[Ethereum] Ethminer reporting low hashrate vs benchmark

gpuhashrateminingwindows

I'm new to mining Ethereum, and I had a question about the efficiency/throughput of my card, a 270X. I ran the benchmark utility with ethminer, which gives me a result of 18153621 H/s (18 MH/s?), however, when I run ethminer solo with geth, or in a pool, my hash rate in the console is typically reported like: "1319793 H/s = 2097152 hashes / 1.589 s", which I guess is 1.3MH/s.

What can I do to reproduce a number near the result that I was obtaining on the benchmark instead of this much lower result? With ethminer running, my GPU is 90% usage, so I guess it's utilizing as much as necessary. Do I need to recreate my DAG file? I've tried adding the openCL switch to ethminer on start, but that didn't help out either.

Best Answer

You do mention that you have specified the opencl switch at start.

Did you specify -G in the ethminer parameters? This is required for ethminer to mine using your GPU. Here's the relevant ethminer --help :

Mining configuration:
-C,--cpu  When mining, use the CPU.
-G,--opencl  When mining use the GPU via OpenCL.
--opencl-platform <n>  When mining using -G/--opencl use OpenCL platform n (default: 0).
--opencl-device <n>  When mining using -G/--opencl use OpenCL device n (default: 0).
-t, --mining-threads <n> Limit number of CPU/GPU miners to n (default: use everything available on selected platform)
--allow-opencl-cpu Allows CPU to be considered as an OpenCL device if the OpenCL platform supports it.

You will get about 15 lines of messages that OpenCL is initialising if the switch works correctly - the same messages should be displayed when you are running the benchmark. Here's what it looks like:

[OPENCL]:Found suitable OpenCL device [Hawaii] with 8513388544 bytes of GPU memory
[OPENCL]:Using platform: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
[OPENCL]:Using device: Hawaii(OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP (1800.11))
[OPENCL]:Printing program log
[OPENCL]:
[OPENCL]:Creating one big buffer for the DAG
[OPENCL]:Loading single big chunk kernels
[OPENCL]:Mapping one big chunk.
[OPENCL]:Creating buffer for header.
[OPENCL]:Creating mining buffer 0
[OPENCL]:Creating mining buffer 1
[OPENCL]:Printing program log
[OPENCL]:
[OPENCL]:Creating one big buffer for the DAG
[OPENCL]:Loading single big chunk kernels
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