Monday, April 14th 2008
New Folding@home GPU Client Available
Until now, the only graphics cards supported by the Folding@home GPU client were ATI's Radeon 16xx, 18xx and 19xx series cards. However, a new beta version is now available from here which will allow owners of HD 2xxx and 3xxx cards to contribute some of their graphics processing power to the project. The Folding@home project is run by Stanford University and simulates protein folding in the hope of finding cures for diseases including Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease and many Cancers. Even if you do not own a supported graphics card, you can still download the standard CPU client and contribute your idle processing power - all you need is an internet connection. To find out more, why not take a look at techPowerUp!'s Folding@home team?
Source:
Folding@home Support Forum
31 Comments on New Folding@home GPU Client Available
That part is a bit dissapointing...but it is in fact running on my HD3870 now.
Anyway, I'm stuck with an 8600gts. My bro with the 3870 is anal about heat from his computer, so no go on that either.
No offense Necro but I really dont care about image quality to express a point. If it was a screenie..... I understand the tip tho!
If the people who made it actually cared, they would have known that graphics cards are the life blood of that program, and allowing the G80/R600 chips to use it would quadruple the overall performance..
His JPEG weighs in at 7.81 KB.
A 24-bit PNG(which still has color quality loss vs the 32-bit that is actually displayed) weighs in at 21.5 KB. An 8-bit PNG(which has a huge color quality loss vs the 32-bit displayed) weighs in at 12.3 KB if you use all 256 colors available to 8-bit. If you drop it to 64 colors, the size goes down to 8.55 KB, but the colors become noticeably dull. That is pretty fast, a lot faster than the old x1k series. The SMP client still seems to be faster though.
I've seen how little I get from running the client on the cpu in my specs, and wish I could run it on my gpu.
@Selway89 regarding gpu usage, RivaTuner.
Also, did I doublepost? Dammit.
I guess thats Nvidias bad then.
Nvidia was actually supportive. I'm not sure if they still are, but when the 8-series was released, they offered to give out documentation and help to the F@H devs. I can't remember where I read it, and the stuff above, I think it was in Custom PC mag a few years back. I'm not sure why the 8-series isn't supported, but certainly, the fact the GPU client only works on ATi GPUs can almost be seen as a selling point, and a huge advantage over Nvidia. Anyone setting up a serious folding machine, or a bunch of them could potentially just grab two quad-core Xeons (the Xeons Fold faster, as they're optimised more for server duties, and FP operations AFAIK), and stick that in a motherboard with like two PCIe slots, stick about 8-16Gigs of RAM, and two HD3k series cards, and have a seriously powerful Folding rig. AMD wouldn't sell their processors for this, but they'd make money off their GPU sales at least.
offtopic there are very few colors in that shot you could easily tweak it to be a smaller size than the jpeg case in point would be the PS3 clubhouse image i tweaked looks very nice and is very small :D
as matter of fact its this one
You're right, the energy has to come from somewhere, but to be fair, we're not responsible for where that comes from, and we shouldn't have to be, as regular people haven't a clue about electricity and its origin/source. Instead, I just hope my energy is coming from something clean, and efficient, even if it is nuclear. Still, my parents have saved enough energy, by cutting down on appliance use, to earn to use that "offset" up, and help humanity, even if it is with only like 3 WUs.
Could get a dual Xeon single-board computer and 19 3850/3870 :D
Probably only get to run one CPU SMP client and leave the other Xeon to handle all the clients.