Crypto Mining Blog

The developer of the Ethminer fork with Nvidia CUDA support (source) Genoil has released another update and we have compiled a new Windows binary of ethminer with CUDA support. Do note that this Windows binary release is compiled with VS2013 for windows 64-bit and is for CUDA 6.5. The latest version comes with some optimizations and a new command line option cuda-schedule to experiment with that replaces the old cuda-turbo, also note that you may need to manually specify the number of GPUs to use if you have multiple video cards using the cuda-devices command line parameter if the miner fires only on one device by default. Additionally to get better performance you can try adding the following command line parameters to the ethminer:

For OpenCL: --cl-global-work 16384
For CUDA: --cuda-grid-size 8192 --cuda-block-size 128 --cuda-schedule auto

--cuda-schedule Set the schedule mode for CUDA threads waiting for CUDA devices to finish work. Default is sync. Possible values for mode are:
auto – Uses a heuristic based on the number of active CUDA contexts in the process C and the number of logical processors in the system P. If C > P, then yield else spin.
spin – Instruct CUDA to actively spin when waiting for results from the device.
yield – Instruct CUDA to yield its thread when waiting for results from the device.
sync – Instruct CUDA to block the CPU thread on a synchronization primitive when waiting for the results from the device.

It seems that the auto mode for cuda-schedule works best for us providing maybe a bit lower maximum hashrate, but a more stable one than the sync that may produce higher maxes, but also lower. You are free to experiment what will work best on your mining configuration however. The Ethminer CUDA fork should work on Compute 2.0 or newer GPUs, but the performance on older GPUs can be worse, also don’t forget that you can run Ethminer in OpenCL mode as well on Nvidia-based video cards and not only on AMD if you are having trouble with the CUDA support or the hashrate you get is lower as compared to OpenCL.

– Download the updated Ethminer CUDA fork compiled for Windows and ready to be used…

Genoil, the developer of the Ethminer fork with Nvidia CUDA support (source) has been actively working and there have been some other people contributing code, so we have compiled an up to date Windows binary of ethminer with CUDA support. Do note that this Windows binary release is compiled with VS2013 for Windows 64-bit and is for CUDA 6.5 as previous versions were compiled for CUDA 7.5, so there could be some performance differences between the different versions. The latest version comes with some optimizations that should increase a bit the performance when using the CUDA mode with the miner, however there are also some differences as you may need to manually specify the number of GPUs to use if you have multiple cards using the cuda-devices command line parameter if the miner fires only on one device. Additionally to get better performance you can try adding the following command line parameters to the ethminer:

For OpenCL: --cl-global-work 16384
For CUDA: --cuda-grid-size 8192 --cuda-block-size 128 --cuda-turbo

The Ethminer CUDA fork should work on Compute 2.0 or newer GPUs, but the performance on older GPUs can be worse, also don’t forget that you can run Ethminer in OpenCL mode as well on Nvidia-based video cards and not only on AMD if you are having trouble with the CUDA support or the hashrate you get is lower as compared to OpenCL.

– Download the updated Ethminer CUDA fork compiled for Windows and ready to be used…

Since Ethereumpool has updated their Ethereum mining pool in a way that it requires the use of the latest version 0.9.41 of ethminer and we’ve got requests to post the latest version, we have prepared a package including ethminer 0.9.41 CUDA by Genoil (source) as well as the official ethminer 0.9.41 from the master branch (source) for Windows (64-bit is required!).

Do note that the CUDA version of the miner does support OpenCL mining as well and not only CUDA on Nvidia cards, the OpenCL support should function on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. The ethminer 0.9.41 CUDA version is based on the new CUDA OpenCL PTX branch that requires at least Compute 3.5 capabilities from your Nvidia-based video card, so it may not work on older video cards. If you are having trouble running the new CUDA miner in CUDA mode on older Nvidia GPU you can revert to an older version or try using ethminer in OpenCL mode. Additionally to get better performance you can try adding the following command line parameters to the ethminer OpenCL and CUDA version:

For OpenCL: --cl-global-work 16384
For CUDA: --cuda-grid-size 8192 --cuda-block-size 128 --cuda-turbo

We have tested the two versions of ethminer version 0.9.41 and they both seem to work well as well as to report the actual hashrate you get when mining using the Ethereumpool mining pool regardless of what hashrate (difficulty) you set via the command line for running the miner software.

– To download the latest ethminer 0.9.41 for OpenCL and CUDA for Windows (64-bit only)…