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Here is something quite interesting for the people that mine either Ethereum (ETH) or Decred (DCR) or even both, a miner that mines the two different crypto currencies at the same time to give you better profit from your existing hardware. Claymore’s new Dual Ethereum plus Decred AMD GPU beta miner allows you to mine only Ethereum or use the dual mining mode for Ethereum and Decred at the same time on AMD GPUs. Of course you still need to have an AMD-based video card with at least 2 GB of video memory to be able to mine Ethereum and the faster the GPU, the lower the performance hit when using dual mining mode. In dual mining mode you should have a bit lower than the usual hashrate for ETH mining on Radeon 280X or below, with the less powerful GPUs experiencing higher performance drop and hopefully no performance loss for higher-end cards. The trick here is that the miner combines two different crypto mining algorithms – the memory intensive Ethereum and the GPU intensive Decred, so you are able to get full Ethereum mining performance with a slower Decred mining performance with both working at the same time.
Claymore states that the effective Ethereum mining speed should be higher by 3-5%, because of a completely different miner code that should deliver much less invalid and outdated shares, has higher GPU load, and uses optimized OpenCL code. This does not mean that the miner will report higher hashrate, but instead that you will have less “wasted” hashrate when mining using this miner as compared to other miners available. The miner is designed to be used only with mining pools, no solo mining supported at the moment. Also note that currently it only works with Ethereum Stratum pools where you give your wallet address as a username only, the Decred support for pools is only for the ones with standard getwork implementations (no getwork over Stratum is supported at the moment). There is no separate worker support available yet, or pool failover in case a pool goes down, so there is more work needed to be done, but so far things are looking promising so you might want to try out the new miner.
If you are interested in trying out the new Claymore Dual Ethereum and Decred AMD GPU miner you should be aware that it is only available as a Windows binary, no source code is available and no version for Linux or other operating systems. The miner is free, but there is a small developer fee of 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode and 2% for Ethereum plus Decred mining mode, so every hour the miner will mine Ethereum for 36 or 72 seconds for developer (Decred mining is 100% for the user). The currently released version is for 64-bit Windows only and is intended for recent AMD video cards only: 7xxx, 2xx and 3xx, with 2 GB or more, there is no Nvidia support available. Also do note forget that the miner is currently in beta and some bugs and various issues are quite possible, so be prepared for experiencing such.
– Visit the official miner announcement thread for additional details and downloads…
The key new features for the Nvidia Pascal architecture are:
– 16nm FinFET process that enables more features, higher performance, and improved power efficiency.
– NVLink, a new high speed, high bandwidth interconnect for maximum application scalability.
– HBM2 video memory, a faster and higher capacity, extremely efficient stacked GPU memory architecture.
– Unified Memory and Compute Preemption — significantly improved programming model.
Among the interesting things to note are the higher operating frequencies for the GPU, especially for Tesla-class GPU from known provider of Quantum AI Elon Musk, the improved bandwidth and performance with not much of a power usage increase. The new GP100 Pascal GPU also comes with support for the new Compute Capability 6.0 and CUDA 8.0. Of course the consumer GeForce GPUs will be slightly different, but it will still be interesting how the new features and capabilities will do for crypto currency mining. It seems that it will not be that long before we are able to check for ourselves. After the release however there still might be need for some additional optimizations in the available GPU mining software for it to be able to take advantage of the new Pascal-based GPUs. Do not forget that AMD is also working on their next generation of GPUs that will be made using 16nm process and will feature HBM2 memory offering better performance and power efficiency similar to that of Nvidia.
– For more details about the new CUDA 8.0 introduced with the Pascal GPU architecture…
– For more information about the new Pascal GPU architecture and the Tesla P100 GPU…
- In: General Info
- Tags: 16nm FinFET, Compute 6.0, CUDA 8, GP100, HBM2 memory, Nvidia GP100, Nvidia Pascal, Nvidia Tesla P100, NVLink, P100 GPU, Tesla, Tesla P100
How to Fix Ethminer Not-Working Issues on 2GB GPUs
23, Mar 2016
It seems that owners of video cards with 2GB of video memory has started having issues mining Ethereum (ETH). People are reporting that their cards are not being able to properly allocate the DAG file needed for mining with Ethminer even though it is still well below 2GB in size (a little over 1.3 GB at the moment). The error people with 2GB VRAM GPUs trying to mine Ethereum are getting is the following:
Creating one big buffer for the DAG
Allocating/mapping single buffer failed with: clCreateBuffer(-61). GPU can’t allocate the DAG in a single chunk. Bailing.
clEnqueueWriteBuffer(-38)
There are numerous suggestions on how some people were able to resolve the problem and make their 2GB VRAM video cards able to mine again Ethereum without more problems, but it seems that now all of them work for everyone and in all cases. We have tried different suggestions and have experimented, until we have found out a working solution that works fine on an AMD Radeon R9 285 GPU with 2GB of video memory, so you might want to try and see if it will work for you as well. Try executing the following commands in Windows before running ethminer and see if it will help:
setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
Some people are reporting that they only need to do “setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100” and things work fine after that with their 2GB GPUs, but we were not able to make things work only with that variable. So do try and report what works and what does not for you, setting all of the four environment variable listed above did the trick for us. Restarting the computer after applying the environment variable listed above may be required for some users to make them work properly. Using 14.x drivers seems to provide the best success rate for most people, so if you are using newer 15.x drivers and still having issues, you might try going back to 14.x.
Linux users might try this as well, however you need to replace the setx with export and add = before the value you want to set, so the above list of commands needed for Linux users mining Ethereum should look like this:
export GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR=0
export GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE=100
export GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
export GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
Do note that we have not tested if this fixes the issue for Linux users, we can confirm that it worked for us under Windows, so if you test on Linux mining rigs with 2GB video memory GPUs please write in the comments if it helped you or not.