It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Alexis Provos has updated his fork of ccMiner (source) with improved performance for mining Vcash and Decred Blake256-based crypto coins and we have compiled a Windows binary to try it out. His latest release brings the same performance or even a slightly higher for Vcash (former Vanillacoin) as the specially optimized CUDA 6.5 Compute 3.5 release of ccMiner using the latest CUDA 7.5 and the Compute version supported by the specific GPU you have. The Decred (DCR) hashrate is also higher when compared to the latest tpruvot release that includes the optimizations submitted by pallas. Below you can find a quick comparison of the hashrate you can expect from this release on GTX 980 Ti, the archive below includes a 32-bit and 64-bit binaries compiled with CUDA 7.5 and VS2013 for Compute 2.0 – Compute 5.2 GPUs, though we have not tested how it handles on older GPUs.
Do note that the focus of the ccMiner fork from Alexis Provos is on the Blake256 algorithms and most specifically on Vcash and his release brings support for very few algorithms. There are some optimizations available for the other supported algorithms as well, so you might want to compare them as well in terms of performance. It is not a full ccMiner fork with support for all of the algorithms available in other releases, so with this one you can mine only the following algorithms:
– blake for Blake256-14rounds (SFR)
– decred for Blake256-14rounds (DCR)
– blakecoin for Blake256-8rounds (BLC)
– vcash for Blake256-8rounds (XVC)
– whirlpoolx for WhirlpoolX (old VNL algo)
– keccak for keccak256 (Maxcoin)
– lyra2 for LyraBar
– lyra2v2 for VertCoin
Since this fork is not based on the latest code by tpruvot there might be some bugs that have been resolved in the newer codebase of tpruvot’s ccMiner. We have observed something strange already, namely the very fast increase of the difficulty to a very high level on the Suprnova pool for Decred using Stratum over getwork, though it works just fine on YIIMP. In the end the difficulty issue appeared to be temporary and apparently something poolside and not related to the miner itself. Below you can find some performance comparison results using an Nvidia GTX 980 Ti GPU:
This release with GTX 980 Ti intensity 31 Decred, 30 Vcash
Vcash – 4453 MHS
Decred – 2394 MHS1.7.4 alexis78 release Compute 3.5 CUDA 6.5
Vcash – 4418 MHSLatest 1.7.6-git tpruvot with Pallas tweaks
Decred – 2218 MHS
We have compiled ccMiner 1.7.4 tpruvot’s fork Windows binary in a version with the optimal settings for mining Vanillacoin (VNL) on more recent Nvidia-based GPUs as suggested by Alexis Provos and with his performance optimizations as implemented by tpruvot in the latest code. This Windows binary is a 32-bit one compiled with CUDa 6.5 and only with Compute 3.5 support as apparently this provides the optimal performance at least on Maxwell-based Nvidia GPUs (Faster than using Compute 5.2 on them). Below you can also see a comparison that we did with Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 from Gigabyte (WF3OC) and a reference design Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti to see the difference in performance with the regular version when using CUDA 7.5 and Compute 5.2 and with the optimized CUDA 6.5 and Compute 3.5 version available for download below. Do note that although this binary will work with other algorithms as well as the Blake 256 8-rounds used by VanillaCoin it may not provide the optimal performance for other algorithms as it is targeted to provide the best VNL mining hashrate.
GeForce GTX 970 – CUDA 7.5 Compute 5.2
Default – 2490 MHS @ 164 W
Intensity 25 – 2535 MHS
Intensity 26 – 2637 MHS
Intensity 27 – 2692 MHS
Intensity 28 – 2718 MHS
Intensity 29 – 2722 MHS
Intensity 30 – 2729 MHS
Intensity 31 – 2732 MHSGTX 980 Ti – CUDA 7.5 Compute 5.2
Default – 3390 MHS @ 211 W
Intensity 25 – 3797 MHS
Intensity 26 – 3884 MHS
Intensity 27 – 3986 MHS
Intensity 28 – 4009 MHS
Intensity 29 – 4043 MHS
Intensity 30 – 4075 MHS
Intensity 31 – 4132 MHSGeForce GTX 970 – CUDA 6.5 Compute 3.5
Intensity 31 – 2942 MHS @ 177 WGeForce980 – CUDA 6.5 Compute 3.5
Intensity 31 – 4418 MHS @ 238 W
Do note that increasing the intensity over the default setting (no manual -i intensity option used) even on a regular release will provide some increase in performance as you can see in our comparison going up to the maximum supported intensity of 31. Have in mind that increasing intensity also makes the system a bit less responsive the higher you go and at 30/31 it will be lagging more, but the extra performance gain you will get with the optimal binary and higher Intensity setting is significant, so for a dedicated mining rig for VanillaCoin you should definitely go for it.
Update: This particular performance optimization is for VanillaCoin’s Blake256 8-rounds implementation, the CUDA 6.5 and Compute 3.5 compilation of the particular CUDA code for that algorithm give better performance than Compute 5.0 or 5.2. The CUDA code is different for other Blake 256 algorithms, including the one for Decred’s Blake-256 14-rounds implementation, so do not expect performance increase in others. In fact specifically for Decred, a 64-bit compilation with CUDA 7.5 and for Compute 5.x does seem to provide best performance with the publicly available ccMiner 1.7.4 fork from tpruvot.
– To download the ccMiner version 1.7.4 by tpruvot for VanillaCoin mining for Windows OS…