Thursday, March 8, 2012

New version: 1.0.6

New version is up: 1.0.6. Go get it!

Quite a few goodies in this update...

  • Improved threading efficiency/concurrency... this equals a pretty significant performance improvement... anywhere from 20-60% reduction in solve time depending on the game setup and your particular hardware configuration. Systems with 4 or more CPU cores will benefit the most.
  • You can now type in a villains range% into an edit box on the range picker dialog.
  • Fixed some HH import issues: incorrect seating order on PokerStars HHs, and crashes on iPoker HH import.
  • Support for the weird rules on Merge sites when 2 players bust in the same hand. This can be enabled from the Options dialog on the "Rules" page.
  • Sometimes if there was an "odd" chip in a tied pot, it would get assigned to the wrong player. This is fixed... although a 1 chip difference usually doesnt affect the results much. 
  • CPU/GPU system information is displayed on the About dialog
  • Some small UI tweaks and other things that probably no one will notice...

This update also includes the foundation for GPU processing support. And about GPU processing, there is some good news and there is some bad news...

The good news is that the potential for increased performance is tremendous... you could easily see a 10x+ speed up for the solves, depending on your particular CPU/GPU combination.

The bad news is that GPU support will be limited to nVidia chipsets only. I have nothing personal/political against ATI's stuff, but I feel the way they have chosen to implement GPGPU programming (via OpenCL) is simply inappropriate for a commercial application. This is a real bummer because they certainly make a lot of good (and popular) hardware.

You can see if your GPU will be supported by SnG Solver by checking the "System Information" area on the "About SnG Solver" dialog".

"CUDA devices" shows the number of devices in your system capable of GPGPU processing. "CUDA compute level" is the version of those devices. SnG Solver will require a CUDA compute level of 2.0 or higher. This is covered by most nVidia devices sold in the last 2 years... all the 400 and 500 series cards.

("CUDA" is the name of nVidia's GPGPU system, FYI)

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