Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better?

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XanderF
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Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better?

Post by XanderF »

Just dropped a Radeon 6600XT in my system (somehow found at a local store at not-QUITE-scalper prices) and was expecting a pretty big PPD increase over my GeForce 1650. Depending on benchmark, this should be a 2x-4x increase in capability over the previous card (on average about 3x improvement).

Only...my PPD did not go up. Indeed, they went down noticeably. System power consumption (measured from the wall by my UPS) did double, so...I guess the new card is drawing power correctly?

These feels like an issue with the F@H software, though - looking at Windows task manager, the Radeon 6600XT is only running at 1-5% utilization, while the Geforce 1650 was more reliably in the 80-90% range.

I've read around on the forums, and seen references to Navi chips having low PPD on small projects - but this one it's been grinding out overnight is project 16475, which SEEMS like a fairly big guy?

I dunno, any ideas what I could tweak/adjust?
aetch
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by aetch »

Not sure how much help I'm gonna be but here goes.

Measurements
Be sure of your GPU measurements.
Task manager can be a bit spotty for reporting GPU usage. Try some of the other measurements available from the dropdown menu for the graphs. For my NVidia cards I've got to sometimes select "compute_0" from the dropdown.
Personally, I prefer to use MSI afterburner as it does give more accurate measurements of GPU usage, temperature, clock speeds, power draw, etc. It allows you to tweak the performance of the card to work harder or draw less power. You can also set custom fan profiles so your system could run quieter.
I also use HWMonitor for spot checking things. Afterburner is detailed but can be a bit confusing if you're just looking for a single measurement.

Drivers
Download the latest drivers from AMD.
I'm also going to suggest downloading a couple of the slightly older drivers and trying them as well. AMD are a bit notorious for bugs in their drivers.

Testing
Have you tested the GPU with other things like games or benchmark/stresstesting tools to test the stability and/or performance of the card.
Quit a few of the big games have built-in benchmarks.
You should be able to stress the card with things like FURmark.
You may simply have a duff card.
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XanderF
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by XanderF »

aetch wrote:Not sure how much help I'm gonna be but here goes.

Measurements
Be sure of your GPU measurements.
Task manager can be a bit spotty for reporting GPU usage. Try some of the other measurements available from the dropdown menu for the graphs. For my NVidia cards I've got to sometimes select "compute_0" from the dropdown.
Ahhhh...I did not notice that! Yes, switching to 'Compute 1' does show usage in the 90%+ range. Which, now that I'm digging around in the Radeon drivers, I see they have a performance section that also mirrors. (Should have thought to look at that first! But it's my first Radeon in a very, VERY long time - didn't even think to check, as nVidia drivers don't really have anything like that performance page in them)

Okay, so that's part of the mystery solved - with the power consumption so high, I figured the card had to be doing SOMETHING.

Still, PPD is so very low. Only projected around 450k or so on the GPU. With my GeForce 1650 I was around 550k-600k or so.
aetch wrote:Drivers
Download the latest drivers from AMD.
I'm also going to suggest downloading a couple of the slightly older drivers and trying them as well. AMD are a bit notorious for bugs in their drivers.
Hrm. Might give that a try. Drivers are "current" - version 21.9.2 released on 9/17/2021. Doesn't seem to be anything newer, even beta. And I'm not sure how much further back I could go - the Radeon 6600xt only just launched this summer. But I'll dig around a bit...
aetch wrote:Testing
Have you tested the GPU with other things like games or benchmark/stresstesting tools to test the stability and/or performance of the card.
Quit a few of the big games have built-in benchmarks.
You should be able to stress the card with things like FURmark.
You may simply have a duff card.
Yes, performance, broadly, seems otherwise as expected. Running 3dMark11 (something I have logged a lot of entries for) shows expected gains - set to 'Extreme' quality, 4k resolution, the 1650 scored 1186 while the 6600xt scores 3956 (same CPU and system otherwise). That's the around-triple performance gain you'd otherwise expect comparing these cards.
XanderF
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by XanderF »

Rolled back to 21.8.2. It's...?better? Maybe? Not sure - could be the new project (now I'm onto 18109). Nothing finished yet, just another estimate from an hour running - now up to showing 700k PPD on the card.

So..."better", but still about half what it would be otherwise expected to be.
aetch
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by aetch »

I had a google about for PPD for your RX 6600 XT, it wasn't great news, it seemed to show your card should be capable of about 900K.
I don't know how accurate the chart actually is but for the cards I have, that are on the chart, they seems to be ballpark about right.
https://folding.lar.systems/gpu_ppd/overall_ranks

PPD does vary between projects as they each load the GPUs slightly differently.
I know the mad? scientists try to balance it as best they can but quite simply some projects are better suited to some GPUs than to others.

Beyond my basic suggestions I don't know how to guide you as I usually just make sure the card is stable and accept what it produces.

Sorry I haven't been much help.
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XanderF
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by XanderF »

Been a while since I dug around in F@H advanced options, but I recall back in the day a lot of fuss over different sizes of projects. And that recollection, paired with the suggestions I'd heard that Navi chips Like Big Jobs (and they can not lie), gave me an idea of something else to test.

I hadn't been running with "client-type" = "advanced" or "max-packet-size" = "big", so I set those on the GPU slot.

That seems like it helped a bunch - now up over 830k ppd on the GPU. Still lower than I'd like, but at least it's a noticeable gain on the card it is replacing. (That said...I have to think on this a bit whether I'm happy with the cost of this card, nevermind doubling my power usage, for such a little improvement - really wish anyone had a GeForce 3060 in stock that wasn't triple MSRP or more...)
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by Joe_H »

Advanced has been deprecated, so that will not make much of a difference. The max-packet size option will help as it gets large WUs, but "larger" may not be larger in terms of number of atoms. WUs from projects having more atoms involved will tend to utilize more shaders and increase you GPU utilization compared to those with fewer atoms.

GPUs are roughly grouped by capabilities and processing power, so some directing of smaller WUs is going on. But for AMD cards there are fewer categories than with nVidia. About a year ago John Chodera started a project to further optimize GPU assignments within F@h, but that has not been completed. I don't know if work on it has been resumed, but at one point they needed the person assigned to this to work on a different problem. SO this optimization was put on hold then.
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XanderF
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by XanderF »

Joe_H wrote:Advanced has been deprecated, so that will not make much of a difference.
Interesting - I wasn't having a lot of luck figuring out which options from various 'setup guides' were still applicable in 2021. Is there a good current list? Anything else I should set in system configuration for best performance? (Current configuration an Intel i9-9900 with 32gb DDR4-2666 and a Radeon 6600XT)
Joe_H wrote:The max-packet size option will help as it gets large WUs, but "larger" may not be larger in terms of number of atoms. WUs from projects having more atoms involved will tend to utilize more shaders and increase you GPU utilization compared to those with fewer atoms.
That's my understanding, and why I went with that - I get the lack of guarantee that larger (size) projects are larger (atom) projects, and it's the atoms the big cores want, but it felt smarter to at least open the door to those options rather than leave it closed.
Joe_H wrote:GPUs are roughly grouped by capabilities and processing power, so some directing of smaller WUs is going on. But for AMD cards there are fewer categories than with nVidia. About a year ago John Chodera started a project to further optimize GPU assignments within F@h, but that has not been completed. I don't know if work on it has been resumed, but at one point they needed the person assigned to this to work on a different problem. SO this optimization was put on hold then.
Ahhh...I wondered why the Radeon PPD values seemed so much lower. By performance in other applications (and games), seems they should be a lot higher than they are appearing, so...hmmm. Hopefully that gets done someday!
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by jchang6 »

sometime last year, there was a big jump in nVidia performance , I don't know if it was with the last release of FaH or something automatic. My 2080 Super were doing about 2.4M PPD before and 3M PPD after. No change for AMD gfx.
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aetch
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by aetch »

That jump was caused by the FAH cores being programmed to use the CUDA cores that the NVidia cards have.
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MeeLee
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by MeeLee »

A 1650 is pretty slow, but a 1650 Super or 2060 would have been a much better buy for folding, as they're more efficient.
There are overclocking utilities that work on those GPUs, where you can limit the GPU's wattage or voltage, and overclock at the same time.
Technically it's not an overclock, as lowering the wattage or undervolting will make it slower, and an overclock will ramp it up again close to stock boost speeds.

I believe the 6600XT has the capacity to read directly from RAM, but that won't make a whole lot of difference to FAH, as the GPU has plenty of faster VRAM available.
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by gunnarre »

MeeLee wrote:I believe the 6600XT has the capacity to read directly from RAM,
What is that called? DMA?
This isn't resizable BAR (called Smart Access Memory by AMD), right? Because that's about how much of the VRAM the CPU is allowed to adress at the same time. It's not direct GPU direct storage either (called RTX IO by Nvidia), because that's a feature where a GPU will be able to load textures etc. directly from an SSD without using system RAM or CPU cycles to do it.
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by muziqaz »

You need to use 21.3.2 driver for your PPD to be somewhat decent (AMD in general is crap at folding). Any later drivers half the PPD. I reported this to AMD half a year ago, they are yet to acknowledge this issue in their release notes. :(
I would urge to report this issue to AMD GPU driver team through their driver suite Bug report utility. The more of us shout at them the more chance someone will wake up. Not the best behavior from so called project partner. smh

Keep in mind 6900xt gets as low as 2.6m ppd in majority of the projects even with 21.3.2 driver. On the upswing, max I have seen is 4.8m PPD I believe. So adjust that to your 6600xt. nVidia's 3000 series in CUDA mode still miles ahead
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by MeeLee »

muziqaz wrote:You need to use 21.3.2 driver for your PPD to be somewhat decent (AMD in general is crap at folding). Any later drivers half the PPD. I reported this to AMD half a year ago, they are yet to acknowledge this issue in their release notes. :(
I would urge to report this issue to AMD GPU driver team through their driver suite Bug report utility. The more of us shout at them the more chance someone will wake up. Not the best behavior from so called project partner. smh

Keep in mind 6900xt gets as low as 2.6m ppd in majority of the projects even with 21.3.2 driver. On the upswing, max I have seen is 4.8m PPD I believe. So adjust that to your 6600xt. nVidia's 3000 series in CUDA mode still miles ahead
I wonder if AMD (Lisa Su) knows how much they're missing out on people folding not buying their GPUs.
Not that it matters, because AMD GPUs always have less shaders than Nvidia of the supposed same category.
It's like a 6600XT should be the same as a 3060, in some games, but Nvidia GPU has double the shaders/cuda cores at only about 20% lower core frequency; resulting in much more efficient folding.
XanderF
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Re: Any way to get Navi (Radeon 6xxx) GPUs to perform better

Post by XanderF »

muziqaz wrote:You need to use 21.3.2 driver for your PPD to be somewhat decent (AMD in general is crap at folding). Any later drivers half the PPD. I reported this to AMD half a year ago, they are yet to acknowledge this issue in their release notes. :(
I would urge to report this issue to AMD GPU driver team through their driver suite Bug report utility. The more of us shout at them the more chance someone will wake up. Not the best behavior from so called project partner. smh

Keep in mind 6900xt gets as low as 2.6m ppd in majority of the projects even with 21.3.2 driver. On the upswing, max I have seen is 4.8m PPD I believe. So adjust that to your 6600xt. nVidia's 3000 series in CUDA mode still miles ahead
Thanks for the advice, but 21.3.2 doesn't support the 6600xt - it wasn't released yet.
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