I use Cryo's GPU generator in Direct mode. Maybe it's just my system but the generator looks like it has crashed for most of the plot creation, there is no progress update. I just monitor my hard-drives activity. During this 1st stage there is little to no GPU activity. After awhile (hours) the GPU kicks in. The process takes longer than the buffer method but when it is done you have an optimized plot. Most of my plot files are 500GB optimized and I have a few 1TB optimized plots. ~16TB all optimized takes about 15sec to process using Luxes Jminer, and this is with the GPU also mining Ether with not noticeable change to Ether mining.
On a side note, My 280X can process the plots in 15 seconds (245MiB/s avg) while the 280 and 390X can only hit 145MiB/s avg. Not sure why *shrugs*
Good-Luck
*edit Spelling
Thanks for the info, looks like I will be re-plotting for the third time... It's a pity that there is not a definitive guide on how to get the fastest plot, I had learnt that stagger size was important but had not reaslised that the GPU plot generator also produced an optimised plot?
I had tried GPU plot generator but in tests it did not seem faster than wplotgenertor so stuck with what I knew, also thought that with the relatively small amount of memory that a GPU has that would restrict stagger size?
So for interest / comment before I re-plot the whole lot again I have 35TB of plots on 4TB & 5TB USB drives. There are typically 3 Plots on each drive using a stagger of 98304. They run through using jminer in 9 Seconds at the moment, this is with Radeon R9 290X although it's almost as fast using the built in GPU in the i7-4790K CPU.
So is it worth doing optimised plots or is there a Windows re-plotter available, or is the gain going to be small?
Rich