Posts Tagged ‘Ethminer CUDA’

The Latest Ethminer 0.9.41-genoil-1.0.4b3 for Windows

24, Feb 2016

ethminer-benchmark-280x

Ethminer 0.9.41-genoil-1.0.4b3 (source) is the latest release of Genoil’s CUDA miner forked from the official ethminer that is designed to work on Nvidia CUDA GPUs, but will also work on AMD OpenCL GPUs as well. The latest version adds some useful features for both AMD and Nvidia miners, though there is not much of a difference in terms of performance compared to older releases, so do not expect to see faster hashrate. In fact the hashrate on AMD GPUs has been decreasing over time due to the increasing size od the DAG files used by the miner for mining Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins.

The latest release contains more advanced benchmark options that allow you to check how performance changed or will change in time, there is an option to set a custom DAG storage folder and even support for stratum mining without a proxy, although currently limited to support only for Coinotron with more pools to come. We ran a quick test to check how the hashrate changed over time between block 1 and block 1 million of Ethereum on an AMD Radeon R9 280X GPU and on Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 GPU. As you can see from the results below the performance has dropped quite a bit on AMD, but has not changed on Nvidia, do note however that Nvidia-based video cards are slower in terms of mining performance for Ethereum… at least for the moment.

GeForce GTX 970:
Block 1 – 17.31 MHS
Block 1M – 17.31 MHS

Radeon R9 280X:
Block 1 – 25.95 MHS
Block 1M – 21.49 MHS

– To download and try the latest Ethminer 0.9.41-genoil-1.0.4b3 for Windows OS…

Updated Ethminer 0.9.41 Nvidia CUDA Version for Windows

9, Sep 2015

new-ethminer-cuda-updated

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…

Updated Ethminer 0.9.41 Nvidia CUDA Version for Windows

7, Sep 2015

ethminer-0-9-41-cuda-new

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…


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