If the ones running the app provide some feedback about their settings and the stability, it would be great.

So where's the best place to get one of these cards and drivers at the best price in the UK? I quite fancy having a go at this card crunching.

[edit] Ahem, I would like to add that I would not buy such a card just for gaining credits, or heaven help me to just to help a scientific project, but I'm sure it would also improve the graphic capability for my digital photography hobby and general usablity of my PC system(s).

And I'd be dying to see how it performs on the latest Red Alert game :p

---

A Few of Questions Please:

1. Will this ATI GPU Application run on a 64-Bit Windows XP Pro System ???

2. If I don't have the "amdcalcl64.dll", "amdcaldd64.dll" and "amdcalrt64.dll" files in the Windows\system32 folder where can I get them ??? or are they Installed when I Install the ATI Catalyst 8.12 or 9.1 drivers ???

3. Can a ATI 4870x2 Video Card be used or does it have to be a Single Card ???

Thanks ...

1: Boinc 6.4.5 does not "find" CUDA after upgrading.. I am assuming this is OK?

2: Is there a difference between CAT 8.12 and 9.1 ? I can only find 9.1 on the ATI web site.

3: Other than loading the catalyst driver and copying in the MW opti app/xml and brook.dll is there any other special things I need to be made aware of.

4: I am assuming that the brook.dll is copied into the milkyway projects directory as well.

1. Yes, CUDA is for Nvidia cards.
2. 9.1 is known to cause people some issues with performance not of crunching, but of the desktop while crunching. This may or may not have been fixed.
3. Not that I know of.
4. Yep..

Another ATI newbie here :)
I've got my hands on a HD4870, installed boinc 6.4.5, catalyst 9.1 drivers and copied the 3 files from the Milkyway_0.19_ATI\Win32_SSE2 directory into projects\milyway...

Boinc starts up, finds app_info.xml but every MW WU fails with
Output file ps_s22_8_93171_1235143844_0_0 for task ps_s22_8_93171_1235143844_0 absent

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

WinXP32 Pro BTW

edit
I have amdcalcl64.dll amdcaldd64.dll and amdcalrt64.dll in c:\windows\system32

I was getting the same error.

I'm also a newbie to ATI crunching and had the same problem last night trying to install on a single core AMD 4000+ running Win2K3 Server x64. I had installed the v8.9 catalyst driver that came with the HD 3870 card. I needed version 8.12. I installed BOTH the control center (48mb) and the wdm (5mb) available here. According to other posts on the board, it sounds like 9.1 doesn't work. You may need to uninstall 9.1 and then install 8.12. After I installed v8.12, it worked like a charm.

Other helpful hints:
1. The ATI WinXP x64 v8.12 driver works fine on Server 2003 x64.

2. I had to install Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0 for x64. It didn't like that I had .NET v3.5 installed which I thought was supposed to be an extension to 2.0. It wanted 2.0 as well.

3. I needed to reboot again after installing wdm even though it didn't ask me to.

Thanks to all those who have worked on the ATI app and for hosting the app on zslip.

I think I have a little problem :

20/02/2009 09:21:02 Milkyway@home Sending scheduler request: Requested by user.
20/02/2009 09:21:02 Milkyway@home Not reporting or requesting tasks
20/02/2009 09:21:07 Milkyway@home Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks

For the past hour I tried a few times, no workunit for me :(

I will try the 32 bits version, with an overclocking of my HD4850 (and CPU, too ^^)

I upped the limit to 5000, its probably not enough :P Didn't want to jump all the way to 10k and have craziness start happening.

On SETI and GPU grid, after a certain number of errors in a row by the gpu tasks, they stop sending them for a day so as not to cause problems. I blew through about 36 last night really fast before I realized it wasn't working properly. Maybe that's something to add to the todo list as more people try gpu crunching.

1: Boinc 6.4.5 does not "find" CUDA after upgrading.. I am assuming this is OK?

2: Is there a difference between CAT 8.12 and 9.1 ? I can only find 9.1 on the ATI web site.

3: Other than loading the catalyst driver and copying in the MW opti app/xml and brook.dll is there any other special things I need to be made aware of.

4: I am assuming that the brook.dll is copied into the milkyway projects directory as well.

1. Yes, CUDA is for Nvidia cards.
2. 9.1 is known to cause people some issues with performance not of crunching, but of the desktop while crunching. This may or may not have been fixed.
3. Not that I know of.
4. Yep..

Another ATI newbie here :)
I've got my hands on a HD4870, installed boinc 6.4.5, catalyst 9.1 drivers and copied the 3 files from the Milkyway_0.19_ATI\Win32_SSE2 directory into projects\milyway...

Boinc starts up, finds app_info.xml but every MW WU fails with
Output file ps_s22_8_93171_1235143844_0_0 for task ps_s22_8_93171_1235143844_0 absent

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

WinXP32 Pro BTW

edit
I have amdcalcl64.dll amdcaldd64.dll and amdcalrt64.dll in c:\windows\system32

This is caused by an incorrect version or a corrupt version of Catalyst. I had the same issue a few posts above and reinstalled 8.12.

---

Boinc starts up, finds app_info.xml but every MW WU fails with
Output file ps_s22_8_93171_1235143844_0_0 for task ps_s22_8_93171_1235143844_0 absent

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

This is caused by an incorrect version or a corrupt version of Catalyst. I had the same issue a few posts above and reinstalled 8.12.

Thanks Beremat & Slicker for your advice

I've downgraded to 8.12 but still get the same errors, have even de-installed & re-installed 8.12 to no avail

I'll download it again and have another go
:(

I'm getting alot of errors to. Got an Asus 3850 on Windows Vista 64 bit. I'm loading the latest Catalyst version right now.

Keep up the good work it is greatly appreciated.

:o)

Everyone getting errors should look in the task details and post the stderr output visible there.

Everyone getting errors should look in the task details and post the stderr output visible there.

<core_client_version>6.4.5</core_client_version>
<![CDATA[
<message>
- exit code -1072365566 (0xc0150002)
</message>
]]>


hope that helps
P4D, winxp32, HD4870, catalyst 8.12

Everyone getting errors should look in the task details and post the stderr output visible there.

<core_client_version>6.4.5</core_client_version>
<![CDATA[
<message>
- exit code -1072365566 (0xc0150002)
</message>
]]>


hope that helps
P4D, winxp32, HD4870, catalyst 8.12

That error normally means that some dll is missing.
Most probably the app can't find the brook.dll distributed with the GPU app or one of the CAL libraries normally installed with the latest Catalyst drivers (8.12 or 9.1). Reinstalling the driver may solve the problem.

Boinc starts up, finds app_info.xml but every MW WU fails with
Output file ps_s22_8_93171_1235143844_0_0 for task ps_s22_8_93171_1235143844_0 absent

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Maybe BOINC just trashes the old WUs and new downloaded ones run fine? This could happen depending on the MW version you was running before changing to the GPU application.

This is caused by an incorrect version or a corrupt version of Catalyst. I had the same issue a few posts above and reinstalled 8.12.

Your Core2Duo with WinXP32 SP3 is running really nice! In your task list one can see about 800 sucessfully crunched WUs without a single one that errored out. It shows the possibility to run the app flawlessly.

Have you done anything special? Are you running another project at the same time?

Everyone getting errors should look in the task details and post the stderr output visible there.

<core_client_version>6.4.5</core_client_version>
<![CDATA[
<message>
- exit code -1073741819 (0xc0000005)
</message>
<stderr_txt>


Unhandled Exception Detected...

- Unhandled Exception Record -
Reason: Access Violation (0xc0000005) at address 0x000000001003B6BD write attempt to address 0x00000000

Engaging BOINC Windows Runtime Debugger...

That error normally means that some dll is missing.
Most probably the app can't find the brook.dll distributed with the GPU app or one of the CAL libraries normally installed with the latest Catalyst drivers (8.12 or 9.1). Reinstalling the driver may solve the problem.

brook.dll is in the projects/milkyway directory along with the app and app_info.xml
and I have the 3 amdcal*.dll files in windows\system32

btw
the cals are the 32bit versions not the 64bit versions I posted earlier, I copied & pasted from the previous message without noticing that refered to 64bit.

I'll download 8.12 again

Maybe BOINC just trashes the old WUs and new downloaded ones run fine? This could happen depending on the MW version you was running before changing to the GPU application

afraid not, boinc is new to this machine today, specially for the HD4879, hostid 50557. Its set to NNW apart from when I retry after changing something ie reinstall drivers etc

edit
DOH, the machine is a P4 not a P4D

Ok,

got my first one up and running-


Question...

And sorry if this has been brought up before -

The other BOINC projects do not run alongside the GPU app.

Is this correct, or is there something I am missing ???

---

.

Everyone getting errors should look in the task details and post the stderr output visible there.

<core_client_version>6.4.5</core_client_version>
<![CDATA[
<message>
- exit code -1073741819 (0xc0000005)
</message>
<stderr_txt>


Unhandled Exception Detected...

- Unhandled Exception Record -
Reason: Access Violation (0xc0000005) at address 0x000000001003B6BD write attempt to address 0x00000000

Engaging BOINC Windows Runtime Debugger...

But most of the WUs on that computer run without error.
Do you get VPU recover warnings (can be disabled if it's causing too much trouble) or do you start some application what is causing the errors?

You could try to reduce the number of WUs running concurrently by changing the avg_ncpus and max_ncpus values in the app_info.xml (raise it to the number of cores in your system for only 1 WU at a time).

Question...

And sorry if this has been brought up before -

The other BOINC projects do not run alongside the GPU app.

Is this correct, or is there something I am missing ???

Do you get errors if you try to fully load the GPU and the remaining cores with different projects or does the BOINC client simply refuse to run another project at the same time as MW?
I thought I have seen some guys are running several projects along with the MW GPU app.

Edit:
Beremat provided a screenshot in this thread showing he is at least attached to several projects at once. Maybe he can answer if he was able to run them at the same time.
I got a report that one gets a VPU recover error if other projects run with the MW GPU app creating a 100% CPU load. He said a possible workaround is to configure BOINC to use only 3 cores on a Quadcore. Obviously noone tried to simply deactivate the VPU recover feature yet. May be worth a shot.

This is caused by an incorrect version or a corrupt version of Catalyst. I had the same issue a few posts above and reinstalled 8.12.

Your Core2Duo with WinXP32 SP3 is running really nice! In your task list one can see about 800 sucessfully crunched WUs without a single one that errored out. It shows the possibility to run the app flawlessly.

Have you done anything special? Are you running another project at the same time?

Thanks :3
I haven't done anything at all. I've run through at least 8-9,000 WUs so far. The only thing I suggest is to snooze/close BOINC while running *any* games, even 2D ones. Even rather low-quality graphic games like WoW will cause these WUs to error out.

I was running a few projects before, and I was not getting any errors whatsoever. It seemed as though 2 other projects' WUs could run alongside. One would get 100% of one core, and the other would only get some percentage of the other core when MW wasn't using the CPU.
Now, I'm running 100% MilkyWay.
I'm getting around 45,000 credits over 24 hrs at a steady rate right now.
Remember, this is only 1 4850!

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