GPU Folding

So, would you?

  • Yes

    Votes: 75 65.2%
  • No (why?)

    Votes: 40 34.8%

  • Total voters
    115
I suppose I would for shits and giggles.. as long as the made it look pretty or something..

Although I can't imagine how how the cards would get if they were at 100% for a long time.. maybe reduce the life of the card...?
 
Heat and power usage not just for the GPU, but also for the system running it. Especially not in the summer.

And if Stanford GROMACS on GPU performs like earlier tests, it looks like ATI will be the only one worth playing with. Too bad they decided to work with ATI so closely on it because it looks to be completely crippled on non-X1000 hardware.
 
I'll stick with the CPU lients...specifically because of my situation. x800 based cards that I have don't have the 32bit floating point, and the 6800 series I have are passively cooled.
 
I voted yes, but I'd just like to see them release something this year. The 5.02 client is ancient now. I'd like to see a client that would pick up a WU that would match the architechure better.

It can't be that hard to detect the CPU type and features and send a WU that will go faster on one type of proc than another. I constantly get WUs at nearly the same time on different procs where the reverse situation would finish up hours earlier. I know it wouldn't work all the time, as it depends on what's available, but it certainly would help more research get done faster.
 
pxc said:
Heat and power usage not just for the GPU, but also for the system running it. Especially not in the summer.

And if Stanford GROMACS on GPU performs like earlier tests, it looks like ATI will be the only one worth playing with. Too bad they decided to work with ATI so closely on it because it looks to be completely crippled on non-X1000 hardware.

Actually it's not that they've worked closely with ATi. It's the fact that ATi's x1K series have a dedicated Branching unit (well x1600 and higher). This is the VERY same reason why an x1600 can outperform a 7900GTX in Physics calculations.

ATi's VPU's are more advanced then nVIDIA's GPU's. Too bad you can't use any of that extra power right now... if you could ATi would have sold FAR more cards. But this has been sorta a thing for ATi since the days of the Radeon 256 (Rage6). They seem to always release cards that are WAY too ahead of there times. And by the time new formats and standards are adopted, they've changed soo much that ATi's cards no longer support these improved standards (Radeon 256 had Pixel Shading/Vertex capabilities... but Microsoft changed the specifications soo much that by the time DX8 hit, ATi's radeon no longer supported the finished standard. This was also an issue with ATi's 3 TMU's per pipe back then.. still to this day Microsoft only supports 2 TMU's per pipe).

But I have to give ATi there due credits.. this forward thinking has paid out in full on several occasions.. like the Radeon 9700 Pro and now the x1K series. ;)
 
ElMoIsEviL said:
Actually it's not that they've worked closely with ATi. It's the fact that ATi's x1K series have a dedicated Branching unit (well x1600 and higher). This is the VERY same reason why an x1600 can outperform a 7900GTX in Physics calculations.
Yeah, ATI shows a 30% improvement in branching performance on one of their slides: 14 cycle "branch A" executes in 14 cycles on X1K vs 20 cycles on "green" (vs G70 on other slides). GROMACS on GPU sticks out if you look at relative performance on GPUBench, HMM and the BLAS benchmarks (R520 vs G70, both are in the same ballpark). So yes, it is unfortunate that Stanford worked so closely with ATI on GROMACS on GPU because performance is not in the same range as other non-ATI assisted GPU applications.

And do you have a non-ATI source for physics benchmarks? ATI is claiming a 14x difference between the X1900 and 7800. The 7900 is even "slower" than the 7800 according to ATI's slides. :rolleyes: Again that makes little sense from the samples on gpgpu.com and nvidia has been working with Havok from the beginning, so I doubt this is Havok FX performance. IMO that 14x difference is using ATI's own routines (optimized for X1K in ways that cripple it for other architectures) and not Havok FX and others (Cry Engine 2, etc). There is absolutely no configurations (software, drivers or even cards used) given, so ATI's marketing materials on the subject are very suspect.
 
I really didn't want this to get into a discussion about Red vs. Green....just, would you fold, and why?
 
AtomicMoose said:
I really didn't want this to get into a discussion about Red vs. Green....just, would you fold, and why?
ideally, the gpu is awesome for folding, since it has such an absurd amount of power.. so yes, for that very reason :p
 
Demon_of_The_Fall said:
I wouldn't because of the power draw and heat created. Same reason that I don't fold on my CPU.
If your machine is on all the time anyway, you lose nothing....Heat is a moot point. Proper cooling and you're fine.
 
AtomicMoose said:
I really didn't want this to get into a discussion about Red vs. Green....just, would you fold, and why?
Sorry about that. I just wanted to bring up that it's likely only going to be an option for X1000 series cards and why. I'm sure people with GPUs of any flavor will want to try. Unfortunately decisions were made that will exclude over 1/2 the potential field.
 
pxc said:
Sorry about that. I just wanted to bring up that it's likely only going to be an option for X1000 series cards and why. I'm sure people with GPUs of any flavor will want to try. Unfortunately decisions were made that will exclude over 1/2 the potential field.
I see your point, and it is valid. Feel free to start another thread to discuss what you brought up....maybe enough discussion will prompt Stanford to have one foot on each side of the fence, as it were.
:)
 
no, I wouldnt. I have to pay the electric bill and more power from socket + more money on AC doesn't sound very good to me... I don't let my CPU fold for the same reason - I'm a poor college student.
 
No. And I've spent 10 minutes thinking up of a reason why I dont. Cause I usually leave my file server on running the torrents, and I've recently installed an X800 Pro, but all I've got is, I dont want to.
 
pxc said:
Yeah, ATI shows a 30% improvement in branching performance on one of their slides: 14 cycle "branch A" executes in 14 cycles on X1K vs 20 cycles on "green" (vs G70 on other slides). GROMACS on GPU sticks out if you look at relative performance on GPUBench, HMM and the BLAS benchmarks (R520 vs G70, both are in the same ballpark). So yes, it is unfortunate that Stanford worked so closely with ATI on GROMACS on GPU because performance is not in the same range as other non-ATI assisted GPU applications.

And do you have a non-ATI source for physics benchmarks? ATI is claiming a 14x difference between the X1900 and 7800. The 7900 is even "slower" than the 7800 according to ATI's slides. :rolleyes: Again that makes little sense from the samples on gpgpu.com and nvidia has been working with Havok from the beginning, so I doubt this is Havok FX performance. IMO that 14x difference is using ATI's own routines (optimized for X1K in ways that cripple it for other architectures) and not Havok FX and others (Cry Engine 2, etc). There is absolutely no configurations (software, drivers or even cards used) given, so ATI's marketing materials on the subject are very suspect.
It may even be more then 14x. You don't actually need benchmarks to tell you it will be significantly faster. Think of it this way, you have two cards.. both are fast.. one has non slip rain tires while the other has summer tires. Under normal circumtances both would be somewhat equal. But in this case they both want to race in the rain. Who do you think will end up making it to the finish line first?

7x00 series does NOT have a dedicated branching unit. Physics calculations are intense floating point calculations and make heavy use of dynamic branching. Not having a dedicated unit for branchin severally limits the performance of the 7x00 series. Therefore the 14x numbers are believable. This is also probably the reason why nVIDIA is being mum about it's physics capabilities. They announced it but have since not said a word. G80 will probably remedy this by including a dedicated branching unit (no choice if they want to meet DX10 specifications). Until then they're relying on an extremely crippled solution.

Unfortunately decisions were made that will exclude over 1/2 the potential field.
No decision was made to exclude anyone. The 7x00 series is a DX9C level accelerator. It was not mean't for Ultrathreading purposes or anything more then Graphics acceleration. The x1K series were built as a step towards ATi's goal of a full Unified shader multipurpose accelerator for more then Graphics acceleration. ATi's is following Microsoft's lead. nVIDIA believes in being cautious and as such have not been working on a unified architecture. As a result they may end up slightly behind the curve (they are right now but out of sheer brute force, reminicent of the x-3Dfx years, they're able to remain competitive).
ATi's x1K was built for multipurpose processing. We knew this ever since it was announced. People didn't really read too much about Transcoding and encoding capabilities as well as ATi's early mention of physics processing (before nVIDIA had even thought of the idea). This isn't Green vs. Red. Because in the realm of the 3D Accelerator.. Green has the most powerful product and the most powerful solution being SLI... Red just has the most feature packed, futureproof forward thinking product.... and it's not looking like that's going to change much once G80 and R600 arrive.. save for perhaps Red gaining even more ground and surpassing Green in the Dual SLI/Crossfire department.
 
No. Because I don't have a high-end graphics card, and don't plan on buying ATI until their Linux drivers stop sucking and start working.

 
unhappy_mage said:
No. Because I don't have a high-end graphics card, and don't plan on buying ATI until their Linux drivers stop sucking and start working.

And I'm sure ATi doesn't plan on placing more resources towards fixing there Linux drivers until Linux stops sucking and starts working :p ;)
Oh and starts gaining marketshare, starts getting more then a handful of badly programmed games.. and ummm.. starts actually being useable by the mainstream population.
 
ElMoIsEviL said:
And I'm sure ATi doesn't plan on placing more resources towards fixing there Linux drivers until Linux stops sucking and starts working :p ;)
Oh and starts gaining marketshare, starts getting more then a handful of badly programmed games.. and ummm.. starts actually being useable by the mainstream population.

Wow - that's the most arrogant statement I've ever heard. Linux's share of the computer pie is bigger than ATi's in terms of installed user base.

MooseEdit: Please, no name calling. edit kk - I hapen to like linux is all, and you've got to admit it was a funny comment
:)
 
MrNasty said:
Wow - that's the most arrogant statement I've ever heard. Linux's share of the computer pie is bigger than ATi's in terms of installed user base.

MooseEdit: Please, no name calling. edit kk - I hapen to like linux is all, and you've got to admit it was a funny comment
:)

I highly doubt Linux' userbase is larger then ATi's. ATi's marketshare is about 27% of the total PC/MAC installed userbase.

Microsoft's share of teh OS market is about 93.8% (including MAC OSX in the equation). So tht lives Linux with an installed base of about 5% at most. That's only on the PC too.. In other words.. ATi's installed userbase is significantly larger then Linux'. Infact ATi's installed userbase is a tad larger then nVIDIA too. (Intel takes the cake).

During the quarter, Nvidia added three percentage points to its share of the overall graphics chip market, taking it to 18 per cent, while ATI stuck at 27 per cent, its share in Q3, as did all the lesser players combined. Intel continued to dominate the arena with almost 40 per cent of the market.
 
Elmo, all of that is good info, but it is really out of the scope of this thread...

Please, if you want to discuss that stuff, start another thread. This is the final warning. :)
 
I wouldn't. I game with gaming rig and do everything else on my laptop. Its not reason enough for me to add to my electric bill. Its also a larger waste of resources in the grander scheme of things.
 
no i wont fold on my gpu. dont need any more heat in this room thanks. not to mention reducing the life of the card.
 
I'd do it because most of the time my GPU is just drawing 2D anyway, when I play something 3D I have to shut down folding to play it, so either way, I'm only folding when I'm not playing a 3D game. I think you could get a lot more people to fold if you would put a -=sticky=- on every forum. I hated running SETI but the way folding is in the backround is much better, I just didn't know about it until someone mentioned it in the Nvidia forum.
 
I have 2 X1K series cards, i'd love to fold on those (they don't get much use anyways)
 
if i had a high-end card yeah i'd fold on it, but i'd probably underclock the card to try and mitigate long-term life-span effects.
 
I would DEFINITELY! YES!!!!! I bought my 7800GT to drive the 30" Dell, however, I don't game at all. I already have my 4 CPU cores folding and now if this is used it could put my GPU to good use as well! Talk about power in less than a cubic foot. HEHE. :p
 
I'd like to see a client that takes advantage of dual core CPUs (instead of folding two instances) and SLI.... *drools* Then my SLI will do something useful for society.
 
Yeah , I'd do it

would the cpu and gpu folding instances be sererate then? so I could run both on my setup..


[F]old|[H]ard
 
Folding@Home is a simulation of how proteins fold. Proteins "fold" when they're being assembled. Several diseases are caused by the misfolding of proteins, including Mad Cow Disease, Alzheimers, and cancer. So the simulations help scientists figure out where folding can go wrong (sounds like a B-movie title :p) and how to fix that.

PPUs don't have the precision of GPUs, so they're not helpful for this.

 
AtomicMoose said:
If your machine is on all the time anyway, you lose nothing....Heat is a moot point. Proper cooling and you're fine.

Really? So the fact my electrical meter outside was spinning fast before I started folding, that it now has legs and actually runs around my house now that I am folding 24/7, has no effect on me heh? Shit, I better tell the electrical company that. Basically I can throw a fan on it and knock some $$$ off my bill... Wow. Why didn't I think of that. ;)
 
AtomicMoose said:
If your machine is on all the time anyway, you lose nothing....Heat is a moot point. Proper cooling and you're fine.
Im gonna disagree. My machine is like an atomic heater, and its worse when im gaming. No friggin way im gonna let heat build up in my room like that - I cant afford to keep the AC where i like it even when its not running...

btw, i think you were looking for "mute" point, moot means its arguable :p
 
AtomicMoose said:
If your machine is on all the time anyway, you lose nothing....Heat is a moot point. Proper cooling and you're fine.

Nah.. CPU and GPU idle vs load wattages are drastically different, something on the order of 2-5x (yea, i made those numbers up, but that's close to the range anyway). That said, I would definately fold on my GPU, but I only like to fold during the winter for energy reasons.

lithium726 said:
btw, i think you were looking for "mute" point, moot means its arguable :p

Actually moot can mean arguable, or irrelevent. It's a dumb word, one of its meanings contradicts the other. But that's a moot point anyway :p
 
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