Nvidia has released GeForce 331.40 BETA drivers with OpenGL 4.4 and CUDA 6.0.1.
They are working just fine for me, including on GPUGrid.net tasks.

Desktop drivers:
XP 32-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-331.40-beta-driver.html
XP 64-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64-331.40-beta-driver.html
Vista/7/8 32-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/win8-win7-winvista-32bit-331.40-beta-driver.html
Vista/7/8 64-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/win8-win7-winvista-64bit-331.40-beta-driver.html

Notebook drivers:
32-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win8-win7-331.40-beta-driver.html
64-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win8-win7-64bit-331.40-beta-driver.html

Does CUDA 6.0.1 bring anything to the table for GPUGrid.net capabilities and/or performance?

CUDA 6 is not released yet.

MJH

Fair enough. But, as I said, CUDA 6 BETA drivers are now available. So, if you were planning any CUDA-6-related changes, they should now be testable, I would think.

Until it's in the dev utils it doesn't exist - you can't build on CUDA6 until the dev utilities facilitate it - it's a license thing!

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FAQ's

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I didn't say "you should be able to release", I said "you should be able to test". But, if CUDA 6 is not available in the Toolkit, then even testing might not be possible.

Regardless, these new BETA drivers are available, and they do report as using CUDA 6.0 in BOINC and via CUDA-Z, and several articles are reporting them as CUDA 6.0.1.

Regards,
Jacob

The present CUDA Toolkit is for CUDA version 5.5, so any driver supporting newer CUDA code will not bring anything to the app - not until the app is compiled using a newer Toolkit.

It's common that the newer drivers are introduced before the Toolkit is capable of utilizing them.

Even when a Beta Toolkit appears the researchers will only be able to test internally - can't release a test version to the GP. The problem with internal testing is that its very limited compared to the distributed resources; the researchers predominantly use Linux and mostly have high end GK110 cards whereas ~75% of crunchers use Windows and most people have mid-range cards.

It would only be worth testing and redeveloping if there was something in CUDA 6.0.1 that would specifically benefit GPUGrid. Sometimes there isn't anything, and it would be obvious to Matt just by reading the change logs. Even when there might be an improvement stability can be poor.

The drivers don't mean you are using CUDA6.01 or 4.2 or 5.5, they just mean they support up to CUDA6.01... It's the apps that use the code and if the app only uses 3.2 code then it's not CUDA6.01 that's being used.

Some AMD/ATI driver updates bring speed improvements (OpenCL), but at GPUGrid that just doesn't happen without an app update to utilize the new CUDA code.

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FAQ's

HOW TO:
- Opt out of Beta Tests
- Ask for Help

skgiven:

Thanks for the detailed reply! I actually did already know most of what you posted. I'm not sure if a beta Tookit exists, or a changelog for it, but if GPUGrid decides to compile against CUDA 6, we'll at least be able to help test.

Thanks,
Jacob

Or someone could jump the plank and test them with the current app. There may be changes, bug fixes and new bugs which are too small for the regular release notes but could affect us. Jacob, I heard you're always in for some new software tests ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

By "test them with the current app", do you mean test the 331.40 drivers against the 8.14 app? That's what I'm doing, and so far, no problems.

I do enjoy software testing, and am available to test any beta apps that are compiled against the CUDA 6 toolkit, whenever (and if) GPUGrid decides to build those apps.

Exactly, just use the new driver with the current app. THere could be changes, for the better or worse, which we'd certainly like to know about if they're there. And never mind CUDA 6 for now, that's still too far up in the clouds for us.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

When it comes to alpha and beta, the clouds are my home.
I have had no GPUGrid computing grid issues, using these new drivers.