Thursday, May 14, 2020

Playing the cuda version of leela chess zero on lenovo flex 14' with NVidia GeForce 840

I thought my laptop was not supported by CUDA version of Leela Chess Zero, the AI powered open source chess engine. But today, I have managed to run it on my old lenovo laptop.

Before this cuda build, i have been using the cpu version, opencl build and the last the directx 12 build. 
To run this, first i download the latest lc0 from lc0 download page. Then, I update my NVidia GeForce driver to the latest release. Unpack the cuda build of leela chess zero and add the engine to my Arena Chess GUI. And it work out of the box.
lc0 running on Arena GUI, with NVidia GeForce 840

Setting Up Leela Chess Zero lc0 25.1 directx 12

this version of lc0 was intended to use with directx 12 card. From Leela's page, this variant is for non NVIDIA card windows 10. but when you try to run the engine on dual graphic card laptop, for example, mine, using NVIDIA Geforce 840 and Intel Graphic, it would spit "Dx error: Unspecified error (c:\projects\lc0\src\neural\dx\shader_wrapper.cc:122)". That error would disappear when you set lc0 to use NVIDIA High performance from NVIDIA control panel Settings.

change lc0 settings from NVIDIA control panel, use High-performance NVIDIA processor