Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Mt.Gox lag comments by MagicalTux
<Happzz> MagicalTux you guys need to buy some better hardware, uplinks and coders. you make a fortune and you still can't handle the traffic and processing you're paid for.
<@MagicalTux> Happzz: hardware/uplink/coding is only 10% of our spendings
<@MagicalTux> close to 50% is legal fees to promote bitcoin's legality worldwide
<@MagicalTux> remaining 40% is support
Current order lag is 48.999525 seconds
https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/generic/order/lag
I've seen this go as high as 600 seconds (10 minutes) - some people reported 13-15 minutes during the height of the bitcoin "Crash" of March 6, 2013.....
I was arguing with someone about the fact that the Mt.Gox lag CAUSED the crash. I for one believe it did not. However, it may have had a feedback loop type of effect, where once people noticed how laggy it was they realized the high amount of activity and tried to sell off as if this lag were some type of panic indicator.
This will hopefully all be remedied by the new Coinlab merger/acquisition. But for now the lag remains.
Monday, March 04, 2013
Playstation 4 PS4 Tesselation AMD APU
Do you think the PS4 is going to focus on tesselation?
efx: the 970 core could do it
efx: the ps4 is running and AMD apu
efx: the thing is, games need reasonable amount of tessellation in conjunction with decent normal mapping
efx: among other things
Any chance PS4 is gonna support DX11 if its an AMD Apu then ?
efx: running crazy levels of tessellation is of limited benefit
efx: yes, i'm confident it will
efx: and next xbox is also amd apu based, as is the wii u
efx: I'm hoping it will help sort out some of the console port BS
efx: no more optimizing for power pc rubbish
Note that you do not need DirectX to do tessellation.
Plus, OpenGL 4.1 supports the current tessellation techniques in the latest hardware.
Also, It would not actually be called DX11 on a PS4 :)
Lets see what happens :)
BSOD BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO
OK. I have a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 bla blah.... So it was having some HDD issues (I guess a 9 year old hard drive isn't the best thing to run a server off of.) So I ran chkdsk and it found some bad sectors and it erased some files that i thought looked like system files, but I had no choice in the matter.
Sure enough, windows won't boot, it just constantly restarts.
Push F8 on boot and hit "Disable Automatic Restart on Failure" so you can see the blue screen. My BSOD said the following:
BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO
Stop Error 0x00000074
After googling this, it pointed me to a bad registry.
The logical step in the matter is to use "Last Known Good Configuration" on the F8 menu, this option did not auto-reboot with a BSOD like before, but it never actually loaded up Windows. So after cloning the HDD, (I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager, but you can use anything), I had a few problems with the BCD file. So i booted off a Windows Installation disk, loaded a command prompt, and typed:
bcdboot D:\windows
It says D: because it found C: as my 100MB System reserved partition, the one with the Boot partition files on it. After bcdboot did its job, my bcd file was rewritten correctly. This may be oversimplifying things because i've had so many hassles with the BCD Files, but you can check how things are going with BCDedit /enum all.
Now I was back where I was before, with the registry still broken on the new HDD.
After trying about 50 different things which I won't get into, I stumbled upon a CD I had used a few other times called "Super ERD Commander" (I believe I was using version 2005).
I assumed I could boot this and then check the registry files directly to do something to them manually, but to my surprise, as soon as I booted Super ERD Commander 2005, it tells me something to the nature of
"Found a corrupted registry hive, Fixing it."
Well Thanks!
So I reboot, and voila, Windows boots, and everything is fixed! No lost data or anything.
Sure enough, windows won't boot, it just constantly restarts.
Push F8 on boot and hit "Disable Automatic Restart on Failure" so you can see the blue screen. My BSOD said the following:
BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO
Stop Error 0x00000074
After googling this, it pointed me to a bad registry.
The logical step in the matter is to use "Last Known Good Configuration" on the F8 menu, this option did not auto-reboot with a BSOD like before, but it never actually loaded up Windows. So after cloning the HDD, (I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager, but you can use anything), I had a few problems with the BCD file. So i booted off a Windows Installation disk, loaded a command prompt, and typed:
bcdboot D:\windows
It says D: because it found C: as my 100MB System reserved partition, the one with the Boot partition files on it. After bcdboot did its job, my bcd file was rewritten correctly. This may be oversimplifying things because i've had so many hassles with the BCD Files, but you can check how things are going with BCDedit /enum all.
Now I was back where I was before, with the registry still broken on the new HDD.
After trying about 50 different things which I won't get into, I stumbled upon a CD I had used a few other times called "Super ERD Commander" (I believe I was using version 2005).
I assumed I could boot this and then check the registry files directly to do something to them manually, but to my surprise, as soon as I booted Super ERD Commander 2005, it tells me something to the nature of
"Found a corrupted registry hive, Fixing it."
Well Thanks!
So I reboot, and voila, Windows boots, and everything is fixed! No lost data or anything.
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Unlocking Radeon 6950 to 6970
I was successful in Unlocking my Radeon 6950 to 6970 with just a bios flash! (simpler than it may sound).
My card was a Radeon 6950 2GB XFX HD-695A-CNFC ver 2.
Followed the instructions at:
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159
It did give the the error: Could not erase ROM
So I followed the part that says Run atiwinflash -unlockrom 0
Followed by atiwinflash -f -p 0 bios.bin where bios.bin is the path and filename of the HD 6970 BIOS you downloaded.
I actually didn't think it was this simple but it was, thanks to this site. Remember not all cards can be flashed, but luckily mine was able to be, and many are also. Good luck. I might be able to help if you post a comment.
My card was a Radeon 6950 2GB XFX HD-695A-CNFC ver 2.
Followed the instructions at:
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159
It did give the the error: Could not erase ROM
So I followed the part that says Run atiwinflash -unlockrom 0
Followed by atiwinflash -f -p 0 bios.bin where bios.bin is the path and filename of the HD 6970 BIOS you downloaded.
I actually didn't think it was this simple but it was, thanks to this site. Remember not all cards can be flashed, but luckily mine was able to be, and many are also. Good luck. I might be able to help if you post a comment.
OpenCL hassles. ATI OpenCL driver bug detected, skipping OpenCL detection.
I just had so many problems with OpenCL and the AMD Catalyst 13.1 drivers. Under Windows 7 x64.
When I installed Catalyst 13.2 beta 7 everything worked fine because it installed the AMD APP SDK Runtime. My problems started when I downgraded to Catalyst 13.1 .
Not sure what went wrong but these were the symptoms:
1) Could not mine bitcoins (Device detection flat out failed, not even showing any available devices)
Reaper.exe would show no Devices and quit out without any error message.
CGminer would show no devices and quit out without any error message.
GUIminer would attempt to start but quit out without any error message.
2) GPU-Z would start and say "ATI OpenCL driver bug detected, skipping OpenCL detection. Uninstall the AMDStream SDK/Open CL driver to re-enable this functionality."
THE FIX:
1. Uninstall any AMD Stream SDK you have right now.
2. Delete amdocl.dll and opencl.dll from C:\windows\system32 and C:\windows\Syswow64.
3. Reinstall the AMD Stream SDK you have. Does not matter which one (I think)
4. Check to make sure the amdocl.dll and opencl.dll files you just deleted have not come back.
5. Check in C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD APP\bin\x86 and C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD APP\bin\x86_64 to make sure the files are there in that location instead. This is where they should be.
6. Try using GPU-z to see if there is a tickmark next to OpenCL. If there is, all should be well, and you can continue to use Reaper/CGminer/GUIMiner to mine bitcoins/litecoins/etc. Or any OpenCL program for that matter.
7. For some reason I had to delete the kernel files that reaper/cgminer had generated such as litecoin-reaperv13.Cayman-256-5760-2.bin but I am not sure that this was due to OpenCL because I tried unlocking my Radeon 6950 GPU to a 6970 (and succeeded, link here) So it may have just been that the number of shaders or something was wrong.
Good luck!
Stuff that didn't work
Removing the entire video drivers, reinstalling, even using Driver Sweeper. But Driver Sweeper doesn't know about OpenCL.
So I decided to just uninstall the AMD Stream SDK from the ATI Catalyst Install Manager in Add/Remove Programs. This fixed the GPU-Z errors but now GPU-Z had no check-mark next to OpenCL. The programs above had the exact same behavior. I tried installing old catalyst drivers, reinstalling new drivers, even downloading the developer version of the AMD-APP-SDK-v2.8-Windows-64 . They would all proceed to install files to C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD APP\bin\x86 and C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD APP\bin\x86_64.
This is where the OpenCL files are supposed to be located. I did a search for OpenCL and found some files in C:\windows\system32 and C:\windows\Syswow64.
When I installed Catalyst 13.2 beta 7 everything worked fine because it installed the AMD APP SDK Runtime. My problems started when I downgraded to Catalyst 13.1 .
Not sure what went wrong but these were the symptoms:
1) Could not mine bitcoins (Device detection flat out failed, not even showing any available devices)
Reaper.exe would show no Devices and quit out without any error message.
CGminer would show no devices and quit out without any error message.
GUIminer would attempt to start but quit out without any error message.
2) GPU-Z would start and say "ATI OpenCL driver bug detected, skipping OpenCL detection. Uninstall the AMDStream SDK/Open CL driver to re-enable this functionality."
1. Uninstall any AMD Stream SDK you have right now.
2. Delete amdocl.dll and opencl.dll from C:\windows\system32 and C:\windows\Syswow64.
3. Reinstall the AMD Stream SDK you have. Does not matter which one (I think)
4. Check to make sure the amdocl.dll and opencl.dll files you just deleted have not come back.
5. Check in C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD APP\bin\x86 and C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD APP\bin\x86_64 to make sure the files are there in that location instead. This is where they should be.
6. Try using GPU-z to see if there is a tickmark next to OpenCL. If there is, all should be well, and you can continue to use Reaper/CGminer/GUIMiner to mine bitcoins/litecoins/etc. Or any OpenCL program for that matter.
7. For some reason I had to delete the kernel files that reaper/cgminer had generated such as litecoin-reaperv13.Cayman-256-5760-2.bin but I am not sure that this was due to OpenCL because I tried unlocking my Radeon 6950 GPU to a 6970 (and succeeded, link here) So it may have just been that the number of shaders or something was wrong.
Good luck!
Stuff that didn't work
Removing the entire video drivers, reinstalling, even using Driver Sweeper. But Driver Sweeper doesn't know about OpenCL.
So I decided to just uninstall the AMD Stream SDK from the ATI Catalyst Install Manager in Add/Remove Programs. This fixed the GPU-Z errors but now GPU-Z had no check-mark next to OpenCL. The programs above had the exact same behavior. I tried installing old catalyst drivers, reinstalling new drivers, even downloading the developer version of the AMD-APP-SDK-v2.8-Windows-64 . They would all proceed to install files to C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD APP\bin\x86 and C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD APP\bin\x86_64.
This is where the OpenCL files are supposed to be located. I did a search for OpenCL and found some files in C:\windows\system32 and C:\windows\Syswow64.
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