Many folding users have reported that they encountered issue with GPGPU after installing nVidia 260.10 WHQL and 295.73 WHQL drivers on their machines.The issue symptoms are GPGPU client crashes after a few minutes/hours when the machine is folding alone whereas it works fine most of the time. The core starts to crash in a loop on an UNSTABLE_MACHINE error, which makes the client to go into sleep mode because of the high number of detected failures.
After investigations, we have discovered that the problem is related to monitor sleep/standby mode. When it turns off, the WU that was running is completed fine, but all the following ones throw the error mentioned above. It looks like with these two versions of the drivers, the GPU is also deactivated when the monitor is in sleep mode. This removes the GPU from the available devices for CUDA or OpenCL applications.
The workaround is quite simple and can be done using one of the following suggestions:
- keep your older drivers (285.62 for exemple) if you don't need the new features
- disable monitor standby in power control panel, and turn your monitor of manually using the power switch.
The issue has been reported to the nVidia's forum, so we hope that the manufacturer will take it into account for the next driver releases.
Source: nVidia's Forums
Updated on 04/10/12 à 15H10 UTC:
The latest beta drivers released today (301.24) seem to solve the GPGPU issue encountered with previous WHQL drivers.
Source: Official Forums
toTOW
On: 04/10/12
