Topic: [Bounty] New GPU Miner - Scrypter - page 2. (Read 3680 times)

Agreed. Altcoins are here to stay and are in the golden age of GPU mining. Some coins will undoubtedly last longer (LTC) than others (barrukacoin comes to mind ). Meanwhile, Luke-jr would have you believe improving his BFGMiner is the path to take, all the while removing GPU support piece by piece, further specializing his software toward ASICs. If I read his change log right, he hasn't made a single improvement to GPU mining since July, and in November removed OpenCL from compiling by default. It's okay though, because "Support will remain".

No, It's time GPUs had their own dedicated mining tool, and a development community to keep improving it.

I completely agree with you that it would be great to have a dedicated gpu scrypt miner! Cudaminer/cpuminer are constantly making updates with small improvements, and it is really sad that the biggest group, the ati miners, are not getting any updated client anymore

@barruka: I think you should see the bounty as a nice incentive, not as a full payment for all your hours. If you manage to make a better performing gpu miner, you will probably get a lot of recognition and tips afterwards on this forum.

when you want someone makes something for you... you must pay, that's it my friend, the world works this way

but I don't care if anyone wants to make it by free, not my problem

Is this really necessary? The original cgminer was created by a programmer 'in his spare time' - there was ZERO bounty.

Really? What hashrates are you getting from the CPU miner and what are you using?

Hey man, that sounds interesting. Care to elaborate on those tweaks?

Why the hell does it matter if he is a bfgminer developer?  Why does it matter that you want it done on cgminer?  The important thing is a continued interest in scrypt and the continued increase in GPU optimization.  Take the good from both and work together.  We all love scrypt coins and all have a vested interest in their success.  CGminer stopped scrypt support a few versions ago.  If bfgminer is still supporting scrypt why not take the scrypt code from both, analyze and put back into the projects still under development.  I'm not a coder but I do know that different people have different ways to do things.  some work better than others.

Maybe your cards aren't running particularly fast. I can provide SS if needed, but in my experience it slows them down. In any case, the bounty is for a GPU only tool. If mining with both is important to you, I suggest sticking with your current program.


No, I'm not a developer. I am a miner, putting up funds to improve OSS; and asking for donations to that end. I don't expect it to be accomplished for .12BTC, however, I think for 5BTC, I would just get a custom client coded for myself -- which would have to be damn good to payback that investment. Why would any individual invest that kind of coin for an OSS tool? Be realistic yourself. If the bounty fails, maybe I will do just that.


I can't tell if you feel threatened or are trying to troll me. Keep it up, I'll take the free bumps. It's also entertaining watching you argue; so No U.

Edit: Just looked up some of your posts. You're a BFGMiner developer? That's so adorable watching you try to protect it. 

BFGMiner.org is a fan site and completely unofficial.

Eh, you have that backward. Maintaining scrypt support for BFGMiner is far less work and more rational, than building a pure scrypt miner.
lolwut, this is just delusional. scrypt is a failed experiment, used only by scam "altcoins".

.12 btc? its a joke?

you are not a developer, aren't you?

you cant even imagine how much time is needed to do what you are asking for

I think you must reward at least 5 btc for that job

I CPU mine with all my rigs with i7 3770k; with 3.5 cores for 7 threads; and it does not affect my gpus (4 r9280x)... Just to say 

Given that there is a Nvidia-optimised scrypt miner in the form of CUDAminer, might be worth focusing on AMD cards to try and find ways of optimising their output instead of trying to develop a catch-all program for both. Worst case, you can incorporate elements of both down the track into a combined GPU Scrypt miner program.

On a side note, has anyone tried developing an Intel HD Graphics miner? Might not be able to get much of it, but would help to squeeze a bit more hashing power out of some desktop PCs.

Great initiative.

Luke: You don't CPU mine on a GPU rig. Most GPU rigs use low end budget CPUs to begin with, and even tying up two cores of an I7 920 @ 4GHz is enough to negatively affect hash rates of the GPUs. I've tested this myself.

I any case, if one did have the desire to mine on his CPU while using his GPUs, you could always run a dedicated CPU mining program as well. You don't need a program that does both, because you don't CPU mine GPU coins, and you don't GPU mine CPU coins (yet). It's bee clearly demonstrated that once any significant speedup is achieved on a different flavor of hardware CPU->GPU->FPGA->ASIC it will quickly raise the network difficulty enough to make mining with lower tier hardware unprofitable.

Did you even read the quote? The quote about BFGMiner was pulled directly from Google's first search result of BFGMiner. It's not a bitcointalk thread, it's directly from BFGMiner.org, and says so in the quote. It is BFGMiner.org's own advertisement. Why would someone bother maintaining a 'Scrypt side' of BFGMiner instead of just building a pure Scrypt mining engine? Bitcoin may have the market share, but Scrypt coins are taking over. The GPU market is huge, and deserves it's own dedicated software.

I'm not going to keep arguing the point. If you want to keep supporting BFGMiner's 'scrypt' side, feel free to do so. In the mean time, I will continue to pursue my interests in getting a dedicated GPU miner written.

Shadow_Runner: As to choosing which GPU (AMD/Nvidia) to run without errors, I don't see that as a necessary requirement at this stage. It's not terribly complicated to pick the platform you want to use when initializing the miner. Further, the intended goal is to deeply specialize in AMD hardware. I suppose eventually it should just disregard other platforms and autoselect AMD, but that's not a sticking point for me at this stage.

Spiffy_1: It's made a lot of people a lot of money. Where's the giving back to the community for it? We could have ended up with crappy mine-share software like the GPU miner for CPU coins that force mines something like 12% for the author. It's one thing to want to make some money on your work, but that's freaking robbery if you ask me. If I were into those coins, I'd put up a much larger bounty for a GPU miner just to make his miner pointless to use, on principal.

Just 1% of everything made on mining with CGMiner using GPUs would buy a lot of damn programmers, and possibly keep us competitive longer. Instead, everyone hoards their coins and does little to work together for something better. I've put up a lot more in that bounty than 1% of what I've taken in since joining the Scrypt community.

Who knows. cgminer isn't exactly a sensible choice in the first place.
BFGMiner 3.9.0 still has CPU and GPU support.

You're quoting from a Bitcoin forum post.
scrypt is not Bitcoin. Someone who takes over maintaining the scrypt side for BFGMiner is welcome to advertise it differently.

Keeping an eye on this.. cgminer and bfgminer have made me plenty of money.  I did find a few tweaks to strip out unneeded code to get my 7950's running a bit better(10 khps).  Still using 3.2.2.  Would be nice to update to something a little faster but it seems that as the authors went asic crazy, the scrypt performance went down.

Must choose second GPU without errors by command line for users with nVidia + AMD installed

What was the point in removing GPU support from CGMiner after 3.7.2?

The point is to promote GPU mining software development, with a GPU specialized mining software tool.


Why would the logical move for an individual, that uses GPUs for mining, to help support an application (BFGMiner) that bills itself as an ASIC/FPGA Miner? ASIC/FPGAs quite literally killed SHA256 GPU mining. Its a competition. Keep Scrypt GPU hash rates/watt high enough, FPGAs look much less attractive, slowing sales and development; keeping Scrypt GPU only, longer. That to me is the logical move.

What's the point to removing ASIC/FPGA/SHA2 support?
If someone wanted an enhanced scrypt miner, the logical move would be to join the BFGMiner team and improve it there...

My rigs are running stable enough at this point where they only time they stop is when I run a maintenance cycle. The crashing I was referring to, would not mean sick/dead devices from overclocking and/or undervolting.

Also, I'm hoping for donations toward the cause to spur development. I'll leave it open for a few days and if no one else wants to make a meaningful donation toward development, I'll close the bounty and simply keep controlling VDDC via OEM tools.

I too would like to see speed improvements, however I think it's best that those come on the foundation of a clean code base already specialized to AMD GPUs. Further, based on other topics, the real speed-ups will come from improvements to the kernel, which isn't being developed anymore either. I'm also unwilling to be the solo donor to spurring kernel developments that would give speed improvements for everyone, but I will donate for a ASIC/FPGA free codebase.