When changing from my old HD4850 to the new HD7870, do I need to reinstall my GPU drivers, (12.4), or will the new HD7870 work with the old installation of the 12.4 drivers? (OpenCL support being better with HD7870, and such things)

Of course I could upgrade to a newer ATI driver, but since the HD7870 should work fine with 12.4, I rather stay with that.

I think it would depend on what driver is on the instalation disc.

The last few times I have been on AMD it has told me I have the best driver for this host even though there is a later more up to date driver.

Michael.

Whatever driver you choose, Don't go any newer that Cat 12.8, the APP runtime portion of the driver is Broken on newer drivers, this is one of the reasons why there is a huge amount of inconclusives around here,

On Cat 12.10 the APP runtime produces wrong compilations, the latest MBv7 apps then find wrong pulses on a lot of Wu's,
On Cat 12.11 Beta and Cat 13.1 the APP runtime produces compilations that make the MBv7 produce driver restarts when running,
On Cat 13.2 Beta the compilations fail to be done, so the app can't be run, (Both on the AP and MBv7 OpenCL apps)

Claggy

Whatever driver you choose, Don't go any newer that Cat 12.8, the APP runtime portion of the driver is Broken on newer drivers, this is one of the reasons why there is a huge amount of inconclusives around here,

On Cat 12.10 the APP runtime produces wrong compilations, the latest MBv7 apps then find wrong pulses on a lot of Wu's,
On Cat 12.11 Beta and Cat 13.1 the APP runtime produces compilations that make the MBv7 produce driver restarts when running,
On Cat 13.2 Beta the compilations fail to be done, so the app can't be run, (Both on the AP and MBv7 OpenCL apps)

Claggy

Thanks Claggy for the warning about that. If the current 12.4 installation doesn't work well, with the new card, I'll just reinstall (uninstall/reinstall) 12.4 for now.

You are going from a 4000 series card to a 7000 series card, so yes you should re-install the correct drivers for it from AMD/ATI. People say that CCC 12.8 is stable but 13.1 isn't because of buggy Open CL drivers. I'm running a 5850 on 13.1 and it is working fine. All the various combinations of motherboards, processors, OS's, CCC versions etc give different results. See what works for you.

But the 12.4 driver covered the 7000 series card too when the card was introduced. So I'll stick with 12.4 perhaps with a reinstall though. Never change a winning concept eh :-)

I upgraded to 12.4 from 12.3 when installed the 5970 card together with 5850.
And that seems to be a good choice here. No driver restarts yet.
But the driver restarts could have come from something other then driver issue though.

About avoiding openCL above 12.8.

Greetings.
I am very new to SaH_Beta and have a windows-vs-Linux question.

A few posts above, it was said to avoid OPenCL above version 12.8.
Does that apply to Linux as well?

I have a Radeon HD 7750 and run linux.
I found that using Ubuntu 13.04 was a path of least resistance since it
balanced OpenCL, a driver (fglrx), and BOINC 7.0.27 - so I didn't get a lot of seg faults at the get-go.

But it uses Catalyst version 12.9
I have used this at WCG without error and thought I would give seti_Beta a try.

DISCLAIMER: I am still trying to get the preferences configured so I can get GPU wu for setiathome_v7. I havn't processed a Linux GPU WU for SetiBeta
But I have several weeks of processing Linux GU WU for WCG -HCC
(world Communty Grid - Help Conquer Cancer).

Thoughts?
Advice?

Thanks,
Jay

ps
optional experience to share. Caution: May contain whining.
The AMD website said that (FOR LINUX) OpenCL was in the SDK - not the catalyst driver.

This website gave the conformance info to allow you to get conformance between SDK and Catalyst.
http://developer.amd.com/tools/heterogeneous-computing/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/system-requirements-driver-compatibility/

Many thanks to Vincent Danjean who figured out the dependencies on building an AMD driver package and wrote an excellent summary.
The data is a bit old but explains what shiny things in the tall grass are bear traps.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/06/msg01108.html

Later on, a readme inside a source directory of the sdk said that the run-time libraries are no longer in the SDK but in Catalyst. But, AFAIK,
windows Catalyst != linux Catalyst (AKA fglrx).

After getting a huge headache, I went with the packaged fglrx drivers that resolve the dependencies. These are in the RaringRingtail release (13.04) of Ubuntu. As of March 2013, Raring is in test. It has an ETA of April 25, 2013.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RaringRingtail/ReleaseSchedule

The package names are
fglrx
fglrx-amdcccle
fglrx-updates
fglrx-amdcccle-updates

hope this helps.

Sten

As the 7xxx card was introduced in January 2012 the 12.xx Catalyst drivers are recommended. Older than this and the GPU will not be recognised. Unfortunately, AMD mad a change with the OpenCL side from 13.1 and told nobody. This broken OpenCL has been used in all of the 13.xx drivers.

I have been advised, like others, that the driver to have for the 7xxx card is 12.8.

I am currently crunching Astropulse beta with this card and 12.8 and it seems to be OK so far, subject to wingmen validation and no errors. This suggests the card is OK as well.