Originally posted by: Gipsel
Edit: Just for clarification, the kernels are not running several seconds or minutes. The kernels are designed to run less than 50ms each. But I call them in some kind of interleaved manner (using different tasks and different contexts) to get maximum GPU utilization. If you do just that, it crashes quite often with a VPU recover (should not do it either). So I went forward and synchronized the kernel calls with a mutex. The next kernel (from a different thread) is only called when the kernel before has really completed. That worked up to Cat 9.2 but stopped afterwards. It runs for some time but then randomly crashes the driver and simply do not return from a kernel call.
Strange thing is it runs under Vista no matter which driver version you throw at it. Generally, the compatibility of the Catalyst drivers slowly went downhill from the 8.12. But the 9.3 and 9.4 are simply not working at all here under XP. Even if I don't interleave kernel calls from several threads (GPU load down to 70% or so) it crashes with Cat 9.3 and 9.4. It only takes a bit longer, so it may run a minute or two with a slow HD3000 series card. A HD4890 still crashes within less than a minute.
Something has to be wrong with the drivers 
Looking to Folding@home, they also appear to have some issues with driver stability.
