Why can't you mine with NVidia?

[terrytek]

WHY??? Since NVidia makes excellent gaming cards, they should make excellent mining cards that would compete with AMD. Srsly, why does AMD beat them at mining?

[miyabwah]

They don't have OpenCL. It's that simple.

[terrytek]

They don't have OpenCL. It's that simple.

Well the 8 series used to have OpenCL. What happened?

[miyabwah]

Well the 8 series used to have OpenCL. What happened?

They dropped it for Cuda, I guess.

[JacksGT]

I think I heard of CUDAMiner recently, therfore NVIDIA Cards should have something to do from now on

[terrytek]

They dropped it for Cuda, I guess.

 

Well, according to https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl, they say that OpenCL works with CUDA GPUs.

[juretrn]

Actually, 8 series intoduced CUDA.

Also, nvidia can mine with CUDA and not with OpenCL, and have achieved some decent results with cudaminer. The record for a Nvidia card is about 800 kh/s in scrypt (heavily overclocked 780 Ti).  OpenCL also works, but it's not a big part of the Nvidia design, contrary to AMD design, which went the cheaper way of using an open compute platform, instead of making a proprietary one, like Nvidia did. 

FYI, I think that Nvidia beats AMD in scrypt-jane based coin mining. 

[TheBreaker]

The AMD architecture is much better in OpenCL than Nvidia's at the moment, and Mining likes that. A lot. 

[VSG]

I am trying out PTS mining at the moment, it looks pretty good for Nvidia cards also.

[Osmium]

Why are you so upset? GPUs were not all created equally get over it. AMD's cards have much better openCL performance like everyone here has said and Nvidia cards perform well in games end of story. What does it matter that AMD's cards outperform Nvidia?

[BasedGod]

They actually can mine, but just not as well as AMD cards

[lachyman]

You can mine PTS effectively with NVIDIA, it doesn't even work with OpenCL.

[TheMissxu]

Maybe,

GeForce GTX 780 Ti, on the other hand, gets neutered in the same way Nvidia handicapped its GTX 780. The card’s driver deliberately operates GK110’s FP64 units at 1/8 of the GPU’s clock rate. When you multiply that by the 3:1 ratio of single- to double-precision CUDA cores, you get a 1/24 rate. The math on that adds up to 5 TFLOPS of single- and 210 GFLOPS of double-precision compute performance.

 

That’s a compromise, no question. But Nvidia had to do something to preserve Titan’s value and keep GeForce GTX 780 Ti from cannibalizing sales of much more expensive professional-class cards. AMD does something similar with its Hawaii-based cards (though not as severe), limiting DP performance to 1/8 of FP32.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-780-ti-review-benchmarks,3663.html

[terrytek]

Maybe,

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-780-ti-review-benchmarks,3663.html

 

WHY U NO LET PERFORMANCE RISE??

[xentric]

Don't want Nvidia to be good at mining so we don't see prices rise like AMD. With these crazy prices It's almost like AMD are mining cards and Nvidia are gaming cards.

[terrytek]

Don't want Nvidia to be good at mining so we don't see prices rise like AMD. With these crazy prices It's almost like AMD are mining cards and Nvidia are gaming cards.

 

I know. When did the cryptocurrency craze really start? I wish prices were like before the craze. Now prices are insanely high.

[xentric]

I know. When did the cryptocurrency craze really start? I wish prices were like before the craze. Now prices are insanely high.

 

Who ever posted that benchmark showing how good AMD cards are at mining. At the same time we started to see bitcoin in the national news.

[algoat]

This is from the bitcoin wiki.  It is a bit dated but applies to scrypt mining as well.

 

 

Firstly, AMD designs GPUs with many simple ALUs/shaders (VLIW design) that run at a relatively low frequency clock (typically 1120-3200 ALUs at 625-900 MHz), whereas Nvidia's microarchitecture consists of fewer more complex ALUs and tries to compensate with a higher shader clock (typically 448-1024 ALUs at 1150-1544 MHz). Because of this VLIW vs. non-VLIW difference, Nvidia uses up more square millimeters of die space per ALU, hence can pack fewer of them per chip, and they hit the frequency wall sooner than AMD which prevents them from increasing the clock high enough to match or surpass AMD's performance. This translates to a raw ALU performance advantage for AMD:

• AMD Radeon HD 6990: 3072 ALUs x 830 MHz = 2550 billion 32-bit instruction per second
• Nvidia GTX 590: 1024 ALUs x 1214 MHz = 1243 billion 32-bit instruction per second

This approximate 2x-3x performance difference exists across the entire range of AMD and Nvidia GPUs. It is very visible in all ALU-bound GPGPU workloads such as Bitcoin, password bruteforcers, etc.

Secondly, another difference favoring Bitcoin mining on AMD GPUs instead of Nvidia's is that the mining algorithm is based on SHA-256, which makes heavy use of the 32-bit integer right rotate operation. This operation can be implemented as a single hardware instruction on AMD GPUs (BIT_ALIGN_INT), but requires three separate hardware instructions to be emulated on Nvidia GPUs (2 shifts + 1 add). This alone gives AMD another 1.7x performance advantage (~1900 instructions instead of ~3250 to execute the SHA-256 compression function).

Combined together, these 2 factors make AMD GPUs overall 3x-5x faster when mining Bitcoins.

 

The newer cudaminer has closed the gap a bit, but a $750 780ti has difficulty reaching over 700 khash in scrypt without a bios mod in order to crank the power output to 130% (over 300W).  Whereas 2 x R9 270s for $200 each can easily reach 900 khash combined (260W).

[RuecanOnRails]

Check the comments on this article, pay attention to posts from DiabloD3.  

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153467-amd-destroys-nvidia-bitcoin-mining

 

These quotes may seem out of context, it's recommended to read the conversation which took place in the comments.  

 

 

DiabloMiner author here. Nvidia keeps claiming they produce a product for GPGPU compute, yet they keep failing on integer performance. Bitcoin is not the only use of integers out there, and its not even limited to crypto research either.

There is zero reason for Nvidia to have made this fundamental mistake generation after generation. This is why I don't support their product, its too slow to be useful and Nvidia doesn't seem to care. I repeatedly tried to reach out to that company, and I never got a response.

Although, now, it is too late for Nvidia to ride the BItcoin train, ASICs are now coming in and making all GPUs (including the highest performance Radeons) obsolete.

 

 

 

Yes, integer instruction rates in Nvidia are horrendous, they seem be as slow or slower than double precision math, but on Radeons I can issue a single cycle integer up every clock cycle on every ALU (VLIW5 has 4 + limited 5th, VLIW4 has 4, GCN has 4 quad width SIMD ALUs plus 4 single width ALUs (and the driver/hardware manages ALU usage across multiple work items to maintain optimal instruction level parallelization).

What also gives Radeons the leg up is they can do certain things SHA256 requires that would normally take 2-3 cycles in a single cycle, such as bitselect takes a single cycle as does rotate, Nvidia seems to be slower at these than simple integer ops (add, xor, etc).

Nvidia needs to focus on code like this: https://github.com/Diablo-D3/D...

If Nvidia was serious about Bitcoin mining, they'd make ZR25, ZR16, ZR26, ZR30, ZMa, and ZCh single cycle instructions, and they'd also make integers as fast as single precision ops instead of as slow as double precision ops. If they did this, they could possibly give current generation ASIC miners a run for their money.

And don't bother making high integer performance a Quadro/Tesla only feature, make it part of consumer Geforces too. The reason people buy consumer Radeons over Quadros/Teslas for double precision math use cases is because consumer Radeons beat Quadros/Teslas at both per watt and per dollar.

tl:dr; Nvidia, stop screwing customers and you'll make more money.

I'm willing to work with Nvidia on this to compete with existing and next generation solutions if they're interested. They just have to email me.

[Nallown]

You can mine with a nvidia gpu, just use a cude miner though

[DIV1D3]

But, you can. 

[scaryjam823]

I mine with nvidia and litecoins. 600 khash I bought it for gaming not for mining so it is pure profit.

[Yoinkerman]

You can, just comparatively for the same amount of money they suck.

[cramved]

Maxwell is very good at mining

[terrytek]

Maxwell is very good at mining

 

But Maxwell just came out. How can it be very good?