Why OpenCL is grayed out in supported and updated graphics card?

[Arielinson]

Hi,

I have NVIDIA GeForce 520 which does support open CL and is officially tested by Adobe.

I have the most updated driver installed from Nvidia.

I have win 7 64bit

I use Photoshop CS6 64bit

and still in preferences->performance->advanced settings

I see "Use OpenCL" grayed out.

Can anyone explain this?

[Noel Carboni]

I couldn't get a straight answer to why OpenCL might be unavailable, but it's clear that the setting depends on capabilities of the display driver.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4414146

The general advice is to seek out and install a better version of the display driver for your video card.  In the case of ATI, their latest release broke OpenCL functionality.  That could be the same story with your nVidia drivers.  OpenCL is still so new and volatile that apparently the normal "latest is greatest" philosophy with drivers is not true.

-Noel

[Mollysnoot]

Does it grey out every single time you check preferences having launched PS? Might sound like an odd question, but I've found on my own system (running an ATI 5850 Radeon with Catalyst 12.3) that it usually does have OpenCL checked, but occasionally it becomes greyed out. I just can't understand what's causing OpenCL to randomly become unavailable on an officially supported card with an up to date driver (but not quite the very latest version, because as Noel says, this is broken). Anyway, this may be of no help to you directly, but at least it shows that you’re not alone in experiencing OpenCL issues… I’m hoping future driver updates will make things more stable.

M

[Arielinson]

Mollysnoot - It is a helpful answer.

I made a restart to the system after installing the newest dirvers. Restarted photoshop serveral times and it was still gray.

Then after few hours after I gave up - I checked that again and now its not grayed out. You have the same issue like me. It is mysterious indeed.

[Mollysnoot]

Very interesting. I tend to find that I need to do a system re-start (not just re-start PS) to re-set the OpenCL dialogue so it's not greyed out. Makes me wonder: what causes PS to sometimes find fault with the driver/graphics card and grey it out, and yet not find fault at other times?

Having said all this, I have found that lately it's stayed on in the preferences, but I bet it'll gery out again at some point soon! 🙂

M

[Chris Cox]

>>  what causes PS to sometimes find fault with the driver/graphics card and grey it out, and yetnot find fault at other times?

Some bug in the driver.  If the driver returns errors when it shouldn't, or crashes, then Photoshop will remember that the driver is bad and disable the related features.

[GarySki]

For AMD/ATI graphics cards, my Radeon 6870 showed the OpenCL in driver version 12.2 but not 12.3 or 12.4. The current beta driver set 12.6 makes it active again, so try the beta drivers if it is avalable for your card.

[Mollysnoot]

Thanks for confirming this Chris. Hopefully the next ATI driver update (seemingly delayed, as they were saying that 12.5 would be released in late May) will fix this then.

Always a bit dubious of using beta drivers GarySki... But as the beta is now 12.6, makes me wonder if 12.5 has been abandoned altogether.

M

[Noel Carboni]

ATI has stated they're going to go off their monthly release schedule.

Not sure if it was a typo, but a few days ago one of the Adobe folks indirectly said something like "watch for the 12.7 release", so there may not even be a 12.6 release.

-Noel

[Mollysnoot]

Thanks for the info Noel. Interesting...

M

[GarySki]

A beta driver is not a completely untried/untested, but an update to the previous drivers to add features or fix bugs and needs testing by real users before releasing a final version; no different than Adobe releasing the CS6 beta, which I used without difficulty except for the non-beta drivers released by AMD/ATI. After rolling back my graphics drivers to the 12.2 version, I used the CS6 beta without issues. Dip your toes in the beta waters, the worst that can happen is you will have to roll back your drivers.

[Noel Carboni]

Warning, Will Robinson!

"Rolling back" drivers isn't trivial.  There is a known problem that specifically with regard to the OpenCL support, the uninstall does not do a clean job of it!

-Noel

[GarySki]

You need not uninstall, but use the Windows feature to restore the previous version of a driver from control panel - a "selective" restore operation, if you will. I've used it many times without is issues, but then again, your mileage . . .

[Noel Carboni]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that covers everything either.  But I'm curious to know.  I don't know what version you're running right now, but if it's 12.2 see what the sizes/dates of the following two files are:

C:\TEMP>dir C:\Windows\SysWOW64\amdocl.dll C:\Windows\System32\amdocl64.dll

Directory of C:\Windows\SysWOW64

02/14/2012  10:04 PM        13,238,272 amdocl.dll

Directory of C:\Windows\System32

02/14/2012  10:05 PM        16,507,904 amdocl64.dll

-Noel

[GarySki]

I'm using the 12.6 drivers

amdocl.dll opencl 1.1 4/5/2012 10:32pm file version 10.0.923.1 12,703KB

amdocl64.dll opencl 1.1 4/5/2012 10:33pm file version 10.0.923.1 16,072KB

[Arielinson]

Thanks Chris,

Is there any way to reset or tweak this and make the grayed out OpenCL active manually?

A

[Chris Cox]

There is no way to activate it manually -- it's deactivated because the driver has a serious problem.  Forcing it active would just expose you to the problems in the driver.

[station_two]

Chris Cox wrote:

There is no way to activate it manually -- it's deactivated because the driver has a serious problem.  Forcing it active would just expose you to the problems in the driver.

I gather, then, that once the GPU Sniffer—or whatever it's called—crashes, its reaction is final.  Or something like that?  I'm trying to use the terminology found in the Photoshop System Info off the top of my head.

[Arielinson]

OK This is weird.

The graying out happen when I render a video in photoshop and than the render crashes.

What I did to fix it is restarting PC->opening PS -> and "OpenCL" is still grayed out.

Closing photoshop and running sniffer_gpu.exe in the PS folder. Then opened photoshop. -> "OpenCL" still grayed out.

Close photoshop and ran sniffer_gpu.exe again then opened photoshop and OpenCL is available. (!?)

I dont know why it happens and why it is fixed.

This is of course done for NVIDIA GEFORCE 520 with newest drivers.

The people here who have ATI cards have a totally diffrent driver issue.

[Chris Cox]

Your card is returning intermittent errors.

Also, running the sniffer manually does no good -- it's run automatically when Photoshop launches.

[Mollysnoot]

Arielinson wrote:

This is of course done for NVIDIA GEFORCE 520 with newest drivers.

The people here who have ATI cards have a totally diffrent driver issue.

Looks like NVIDA also have work to do on updating their drivers then!

I don't think ATI users necessarily have a totally different driver issue: we've confirmed through your thread that the problem causing OpenCL to intermittently become unavailable is most likely to be the result of errors caused by the graphics card driver, and I'm hopeful that it will be resolved by future driver updates (in fact GraySki's experience is that it already has been fixed on the ATI side). What causes PS to identify that there's a driver error may vary considerably: might be rendering video as you've experienced, might be using say the new blur filters. But the basic underlying issue appears to be driver error, regardless of the card manufacturer.

M

[Noel Carboni]

Something that might help explain the inconsistency / intermittency is to remember that the GPU isn't just a hunk of silicon sitting there quietly waiting for you to give it work to do.  It also runs your computer display all the while you're starting Photoshop, editing images, etc.  On a Windows system, for example, besides moving data around for display on one or more monitors, all the little animations, Aero transparency, drop shadows - even the entire content of your Internet Explorer windows - are done by GPU programming.

The display subsystem has the complexity of an entire operating system in itself.  I was noticing the ATI driver updates are now getting closer to 200 megabytes each.

-Noel

[Arielinson]

Yep. Both manufacturers and Adobe need to do some more work in making this stable.

I'm rendering a 4 seconds 3d animation with a single simple object and the program crashes all the time while rendering.

I guess its not a faulty graphics card on my end if others are experiencing the same issues.

I guess there is no solution for this but to wait for all parties to recognize these stability issues and fix them.

[pradeepr83604957]

Hi Arielinson

I am facing same problem in photoshop cc 2017 32 bit. I Can't understand how to fixed this problem. Can you please explain steps for fixed this problem.

[Arielinson]

Hi Pradeepr83604957,

My problem was fixed when I bought a new graphics cards.

Please make sure your GPU is supported by Photoshop and that you have the most updated drivers.