My 5870 has been burning through WU's in +/- 80-85 seconds per WU. However between WU's I can see a drop in GPU activity, it is very short, but it is a drop.

This drop is it lost time as the WU changes? Would longer WU's increase effeciancy? Or it is code being unloaded & reloaded into the graphics card? I'm only asking this questions because the WU's fly by so quickly this drop happens very often.

Y.

This drop is it lost time as the WU changes? Would longer WU's increase effeciancy? Or it is code being unloaded & reloaded into the graphics card? I'm only asking this questions because the WU's fly by so quickly this drop happens very often.

Hi Yakk,

This normal. When a WU is finished the GPU has less to do and its activity degreases. When a few secs later a new WU starts it increases again. And so on.
You can see the same when looking at its temperature curve.

---

Greetings from,
TJ

There is an unload / load time of 2 secs a go, as the old one is pulled out by the cpu, and the new one is loaded. On some slower cards that can be about 3 seconds, nothing you can do, its a pure load/unload process

That's why some of us use app_info.xml files to get 2 WUs running concurrently on single GPU. If their start time is offset by more than 2s then there is no dip in GPU activity.
BR,

---

So yes, having longer WUs would technically increase GPU utilization slightly. But there's no simple way to artificially increase WU size - the WUs would actually have to do more calculations, or do the same calculations at a higher precision. That has already been done several times, but at this point I think you'd have to develop a more complex model to benefit from increased precision or wider strips of the sky.