Topic: Jumps in mining software capability (Read 1139 times)

Yes, I understand what you're trying to say.
I only wanted to make clear there's a need for improvement.
At the end of the day HW alone does nothing and SW alone does very little. NV right now has a certainly better ecosystem around it.

It is related to the "shape" the kernel gets.
Imagine putting a square peg in a round hole. To do this, GPUs split the beg in pieces, pass each smaller piece then put them back on the other side.
AMD believes this is not efficient usage of transistors and this is a reason they won the console war again. NV by contrast believes they should optimize the worst case and this is what they do.

Chained hashing is even worse: you have taped several pegs together!

It took me almost two months to redo qubit + miner modifications (qubit is the tail of X11 FYI, it could be considered X5). I guess you get the idea.

It is possible - and perhaps even likely - many have the improved kernels already. If they have a room full of GPUs, they are consistent advantage. If you have one, not so much.

Not all algorithms can be improved. Some are so simple they're close to efficient... it's on a case-by-case basis. For example, Echo is nearly optimal. I honestly don't like X11/X13 much, the main problem I see is: it is inefficient for GPU users, it is inefficient for a small company doing FPGAs... it is a pipe dream for a big investor who wants to roll out its own ASIC already (they are shelling out 7-digits so paying four engineers instead of one isn't much of a problem). I simply don't like the idea but it's an hash like everything else out of here.

When I said NVIDIA is pulling ahead, I meant that it seems the power consumption to hash ratio with current software appears more efficient at the current time, at least for some algos. Now I did some googling on porting and did not find much, and what I found seems to go beyond my current abilities / comprehension. Is this pertaining to different OSes (Linux vs Windows)? GPU vs CPU software (i.e. jamming AMD into software meant for CPUs where as NVIDIA gets it's own miner). Or the language the program is coded in?

If this possibility exists and large gains can be made, why has nobody done it? Is this something that the coders are keeping to themselves? Or is it only possible with certain algos? Would like to learn more about the possibilities and limitations of this.

Perhaps where I am going wrong is as simple as that I am still mining X11/X13? However if I can garner more power out of these puppies for new coin launches (the majority of which seem to be X11) I would be stoked. What has to be done isn't so much of a concern, more so being pointed in the right direction.

i also dont agree with that that nvidia is ahead of amd. amd gpu's are true beast compared with nvidia for mining, but also amd has wery bad support of drivers, and the miner software are not optimized at all. Nist5 algoritm show's how far can amd gpus go, and that is from my opinion only 30, 40% of what amd (for example r9 290x) can do with performance.

Just to make this clear: NVidia does not just have a 12+ months advantage in manufacturing capability... they also use different kernels, which were properly ported.

The state of things for AMD miners is sad. The code hasn't been ported to GPU, it has basically been mashed to run with a direct conversion of the CPU code taken from SPHlib. Unfortunately, AMD hinted a few times they're not interested in making slow code go fast but rather provide power to those who know where to look at.
Just porting (not even optimizing) made my qubit go up 80%.

So NV might be good but you can bet a large part of benefit is purely software.

I dont think so, 14.6 should be the latest improvement....

Have there been any recent improvements? Aside from x11/x13mod + 14.6 drivers?

Running a small miner, just 2 x R9 270s, pulling 2.5MH/s per card. I also occasionally throw my gaming rig into the mix (just a 560Ti, pulls 1.5MH/s in x11). I have read murmurs of additional boosts being possible with improved mining software, but haven't been able to find much by browsing through the last month or two of posts. Well, aside from hearsay or tweaked drivers/configs that have (at best) mixed results. Most of the improved updates/forks seem to be at least two or three months old.

Is there anything already available or on the horizon to improve the performance of existing cards? Does anybody know if this is even possible?

Been considering a switch to NVIDIA now that they're picking up and pulling ahead of AMD, that or selling off my miner and just doubling down on trading/minting/investing. At the moment GPU mining definitely seems dead, but I enjoy it as a hobby and am in it for the long haul (accumulating coins, increasing my knowledge, etc).

Thoughts?