Hi there,
How to use/activate those new kernels?
Do they are auto activated by default or do we have to type some addition command line option to activate them?
And for which models are affected? 10 series? older? any Nvidia GPUs?
Do they need specified driver version too for optimal performance,
or at least some driver version and above, say 4xx.xx and above?
Thanks
There is no need to change any settings, the new kernels replace the old ones. The difference is small but noticeable, especially with 1060 and 1050 cards. With 1080 and 1080Ti there is not much difference. With 9 series GPUs it is a bit of hit or miss but at least they aren't slower than the old kernels. It shouldn't matter which drivers you are using.
When comparing make sure to compare with roughly the same DAG epoch (i.e. compare with the result for the same coin, instead of comparing ETC with ETH hashrate) because there is small but noticeable slowdown of even the 10 series Nvidia GPUs with each new DAG epoch. Hopefully Nvidia would fix it in the drivers as AMD did but given that this wasn't fixed for the 9th series, we aren't too hopeful. Thankfully, it is quite small.
Got it, thank you for those details.