How Intensity Affects Performance in ccMiner

After a reader suggested that the difference in performance between different forks of ccMiner can be a direct result from the use of different default values for intensity we have decided to dig a bit into how the -i value affects hashrate. We have used ccMiner 1.4.2 SP-mod as an example along with WhirlpoolX on a GeForce GTX 980 GPU. The range of intensity that we have tested is between 10 and 26 with 26 being the default one for the ccMiner SP-mod. You can go with intensity of under 10, but the performance will drop further and there is actually no reason to do it, going over 26 is also possible but will hardly result in any performance increase. Going below Intensity value of 26 may be good thing to do if you are mining on your primary video card on a computer that you are using, so lowering the intensity can be useful in making things more responsive (even 1-2 steps can make a difference without much performance loss). You can see the results with different settings for intensity on our test setup below:

WhirlpoolX – GTX 980:

Intensity 10 – 4377 KHS

Intensity 11 – 8157 KHS

Intensity 12 – 17252 KHS

Intensity 13 – 34283 KHS

Intensity 14 – 67009 KHS

Intensity 15 – 99110 KHS

Intensity 16 – 107568 KHS

Intensity 17 – 140759 KHS

Intensity 18 – 175111 KHS

Intensity 19 – 199488 KHS

Intensity 20 – 214410 KHS

Intensity 21 – 222802 KHS

Intensity 22 – 225320 KHS

Intensity 23 – 228779 KHS

Intensity 24 – 231550 KHS

Intensity 25 – 231755 KHS

Intensity 26 – 232204 KHS