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ATI Driver Issue?

L

lelliott731

[H]ard DCOTM April 2017
Joined
Mar 15, 2002
Messages
941
Hey guys, I was just curious as to whether or not everyone else is having the same issue as I am with my two ATI 4870 cards. They each take up 40% or more of CPU use to fold under Vista, whereas a nVidia card uses around 6% or so.

Why is there such a difference? And does anyone know if the ATI team is going to get them running full speed? Or is 2-4k PPD on a 4870 the best it's going to get?
 
I think there is a new core and dll for ATi users?
AFAIK, CPU useage remains high on ATi vs. nVidia.

It's possible newer drivers will lower the CPU usage as nVidia's 180 series have.
 
lelliott731 said:
They each take up 40% or more of CPU use to fold under Vista, whereas a nVidia card uses around 6% or so.
Click to expand...

I assume you are running the core with the default settings.

In Core_11 1.22, ATI users were given the option to change the FLUSH_INTERVAL
This flag sets the maximum command packet size sent to the GPU.
The higher the number, the lower the CPU load will be.
This flag can be set at a value of 2 - 1024.
The default setting for Core_11 1.22v is 16. (What is causing your high CPU load)

I would suggest setting a value of 256 or 512 --> try the 256 first.

To set a "Enviroment Variable"
Right click on My Computer --> Properties --> Advanced Tab --> Enviroment Variable
Add a New System Variable {Name: FLUSH_INTERVAL Value: 256}
Restart the System and relaunch the client.

In future core versions, this value will be set automaically based on you card type.
You will know if you set this value to high because you will get desktop lag.


lelliott731 said:
Why is there such a difference? And does anyone know if the ATI team is going to get them running full speed? Or is 2-4k PPD on a 4870 the best it's going to get?
Click to expand...

There is constant work being down on the ATI core.
I will just take some time to get all the optimizations stable and ready for public use.
 
Thanks for that info Evil, hopefully it'll help. The ATI core has been moving along quite well recently, and I hope CPU usage is the next area to see major improvement.
 
Zero82z said:
I hope CPU usage is the next area to see major improvement.
Click to expand...

As you know, CAL 1.3 was released with the Catalyst 8.12 driver package.
With this release, there are more options available for optimizations but those will take some time.

Right now, the ATI driver team is looking to a few issues with multi-gpu setup scaling.
This affects both XP (x86 & x64) as well as Vista (x86 & x64).

There is also an issue with Vista involving a directx sub-component and cpu usage being worked on. This does not affect XP(x86 or x64) only Vista x86 & x64.
 
I actually haven't tried it yet, my 30 day trial ran out on my Vista install, so I haven't been back to re-install it. But I'll let you know once I do.
 
I tried 256, and it dropped it from the average of 44-46% to 28-34%, which is good. I'm going to try 384 and then 512 and see what happens. I'll post back my results. This is with the 8.12 driver set.
 
Also, I just noticed that my "System" process is taking up 15% or more of CPU resources. Is this another crappy part of Windows Vista? Or does this have to do again with the ATI drivers?
 
lelliott731 said:
"System" process is taking up 15% or more of CPU
Click to expand...

This *issue* was noticed just very recently.
The "System" process running is actually a DirectX component.
Why it is running is a mystery and the ATI driver team has been made aware of this issue.

I noticed it a little while back while looking at the CPU usage on my Quad 4850 systems.

The issue only affects Vista (x86 & x64) running ATI GPUs.
XP (x86 & x64) and nVidia GPUs don't seem to be affected.
 
Thanks for that info Evil. And in regards to the CAL dlls mhouston, I assume I'm using the driver supplied ones. They have a newer date as the ones that came with the client. Should I move back to the ones that came with the F@H Client?
 
So after setting the flush interval to 256 a few days ago, my CPU usage was reduced to around 50%, but my PPD was pretty much halved as well. I got rid of the environment variable and it's running at 100% right now, but if anyone has any idea why that would happen, I'd love to hear it.
 
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