I must say that I didn't have any problem benchmarking amd cards: if the room was hot, I'd put the fans at high speed, run the miner and wait a couple minute to stabilize, and that's it. I could make 100 changes to a kernel in a day and check them all, accurately.
On nvidia I have throttling problems I can't easily fix (the cards reduce clock speed in a number of situations I just can't predict), overclocking/downclocking is more difficult as the cards tend to change clocks by themselves, and the hashrates fluctuates wildly, and even changes between ccminer runs.
The rig is headless so I only have nvidia-smi to work with, and it can't set the fan speed.
So when I make a little kernel speedup, I spend more time benchmarking it (to be sure it's indeed an improvement), than making the improvement itself :-/
Maybe there are some nvidia-smi settings to make it more stable?
Or maybe on windows it's different...
Finally I may need a workstation with a nvidia as main card, and work on it.
On nvidia I have throttling problems I can't easily fix (the cards reduce clock speed in a number of situations I just can't predict), overclocking/downclocking is more difficult as the cards tend to change clocks by themselves, and the hashrates fluctuates wildly, and even changes between ccminer runs.
The rig is headless so I only have nvidia-smi to work with, and it can't set the fan speed.
So when I make a little kernel speedup, I spend more time benchmarking it (to be sure it's indeed an improvement), than making the improvement itself :-/
Maybe there are some nvidia-smi settings to make it more stable?
Or maybe on windows it's different...
Finally I may need a workstation with a nvidia as main card, and work on it.
Buy another 970 card. The gigabyte windforce oc never trottle and mines on a stable clockrate. easy to verify speedups. For very small changes, taka a look at the generated PTX assembly code, less code lines is bether but not always..
You can also test your chances on a big rig with many cards, If you have many cards small speedups of 0-1 KHASH per card can be visible.
To finance the cards, you can hope that you will ROI the cards in 1 year by increasing the speed of the kernals
Yeah the one plus side to the Gigabyte cards is they never seem to throttle and clock the highest. Of course they use like 10-15% more power then all the other cards, so...