• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Making running the GPU client bearable while using the PC

E

Elledan

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2010
Joined
Oct 18, 2001
Messages
15,913
I started folding on a new GTX 660 Ti yesterday in my main system and while it's generally a positive experience there is one thing I could do without: the same kind of horrible system lag I experienced with specific GPU drivers with the previous GPU clients, 2+ years ago.

I'm running the latest 306.97 NVidia drivers on Win7 x64. After setting the CPU usage slider in the FAHControl utility to 85% it's somewhat more bearable, though still far from being smooth. Is there any trick to employ at this point to make GPU folding more smooth during general usage including video playback?

In the past the general routine was to install a specific driver version which didn't exhibit the lag symptoms, but I do not know if this is still common practice now?
 
Subscribing to this since both my systems suffer from tremendous lag when I am using it. Not just video play back, but overall operating of the computer. It's to the point that I have to stop the folding when I am using the computer because it becomes nearly impossible to get anything done.
 
Skillz said:
Subscribing to this since both my systems suffer from tremendous lag when I am using it. Not just video play back, but overall operating of the computer. It's to the point that I have to stop the folding when I am using the computer because it becomes nearly impossible to get anything done.
Click to expand...


+1

I agree.

The computer does not function with this "running in the background."
 
My 2011 server machine lags bad when folding on a 660Ti. My main machine folding on 2x 680 and 1x 650Ti doesn't lag a bit. I don't get it.
 
DooKey said:
My 2011 server machine lags bad when folding on a 660Ti. My main machine folding on 2x 680 and 1x 650Ti doesn't lag a bit. I don't get it.
Click to expand...

What's weird is my main rig w/ i7 870 folding and 470 GTX folding the lag isn't nearly as bad as the lag I get on my 1090t folding and 570 GTX folding. I literally can't move the mouse on that rig when it's folding. The lag is so tremendous, I HAVE to shut them down.

On my main rig, it's laggy as hell, but it's bearable as long as I'm not doing anything except reading forums/web sites.
 
DooKey said:
My 2011 server machine lags bad when folding on a 660Ti. My main machine folding on 2x 680 and 1x 650Ti doesn't lag a bit. I don't get it.
Click to expand...

Similar situation here: one Q6600 system with two 660 Tis doesn't lag at all while folding, while the other with a single 660 Ti lags to hell and back, making everything from videos to browsing an aggravating experience.
 
Elledan said:
I started folding on a new GTX 660 Ti yesterday in my main system and while it's generally a positive experience there is one thing I could do without: the same kind of horrible system lag I experienced with specific GPU drivers with the previous GPU clients, 2+ years ago.

I'm running the latest 306.97 NVidia drivers on Win7 x64. After setting the CPU usage slider in the FAHControl utility to 85% it's somewhat more bearable, though still far from being smooth. Is there any trick to employ at this point to make GPU folding more smooth during general usage including video playback?

In the past the general routine was to install a specific driver version which didn't exhibit the lag symptoms, but I do not know if this is still common practice now?
Click to expand...


Have you tried different drivers? I use 285.x on my 560ti and it seems ok. Still able to surf web. watch movies online while folding with no problem.
 
Have you tried enabling/disabling Aero if on Win7? I had issues similar to what you are describing on win7, and depending on the version of the nvidia drivers I used I would have lag with aero off, some more recent drivers I had lag regardless.

On Win8 I haven't had any issues with lag, folding on both my 3770k, and GTX 580.
 
sc0tty8 said:
Go on. I have optimus. How do you set it up to do this?
Click to expand...

Well, on a laptop with Muxless Optimus like mine, that is how it works by default. the displays are all connected to the HD4000 permanently and when the GPU is in use it renders out to a framebuffer that is then copied to the HD4000 for display. So essentially pegging the GPU with work has no effect on my windows desktop.

Now if you have a MUX'd optimus solution, it may be a little bit different, but essentially you would want to switch to the integrated graphics, and then tell FAHClient to run on the GPU. Hopefully your computer can still "see" the GPU when it is set to integrated mode, if that's the case.
 
Have you guys tried turning off GPU acceleration in your web browsers?
 
If you are running vista or 7 try messing around with the settings for the "Aero" interface (turning the hardware acceleration on or off).
 
tkam said:
Have you guys tried turning off GPU acceleration in your web browsers?
Click to expand...

I turned hardware acceleration off in Firefox and it helped tremendously. Unfortunately when I have, say, a Flash video playing on one screen and I open up a program like Visual Studio (2010), the video and VS start lagging to hell and back.
 
tkam said:
If you are running vista or 7 try messing around with the settings for the "Aero" interface (turning the hardware acceleration on or off).
Click to expand...

The machine that is lagging is running WHS 2011. I don't believe it allows for Aero, but I'll take a look. The machine running fine is on W8.
 
extide said:
Well, on a laptop with Muxless Optimus like mine, that is how it works by default. the displays are all connected to the HD4000 permanently and when the GPU is in use it renders out to a framebuffer that is then copied to the HD4000 for display. So essentially pegging the GPU with work has no effect on my windows desktop.

Now if you have a MUX'd optimus solution, it may be a little bit different, but essentially you would want to switch to the integrated graphics, and then tell FAHClient to run on the GPU. Hopefully your computer can still "see" the GPU when it is set to integrated mode, if that's the case.
Click to expand...

Yeah its a laptop, it switches between the cards so not sure how that would work. With it on auto, v7 will lock this up. The CPU is good for 20k under windows and doesn't get hot :)
 
My god I thought I was the only one with this problem. Now I feel a bit better. Turning off hardware acceleration in Firefox does help however I still cant do much with my desktop so I don't feel that it is a solution. It seems strange that folding is supposed to be done in the background and not noticeable and now GPU folding seems to render some computers useless. I think they need to go back to the drawing board for the program instead of worrying about QRB. When I ran my 2 260's in SLI I never had any problems however that was before version 7.
 
Well, this is a shot in the dark.

If you're primarily having problems with firefox, you could try the following:
1) In the address bar, type about:config.
2) Do a find for viewmanager.do_doublebuffering and set it to false.

It's a flash thing on I've seen on some PCs.
 
sc0tty8 said:
Yeah its a laptop, it switches between the cards so not sure how that would work. With it on auto, v7 will lock this up. The CPU is good for 20k under windows and doesn't get hot :)
Click to expand...

What laptop exactly is it? The only ones that really use MUX's these days are the Alienwares, but if you have a P150EM /NP9150 then it is muxless. I run v7.2.9, and use GPU only. I could fold CPU too, but I don't want to blow the power socket on this thing, heh.
 
Cypher- said:
It seems strange that folding is supposed to be done in the background and not noticeable and now GPU folding seems to render some computers useless.
Click to expand...

This is really a core GPU (and maybe GPU driver) issue and doesn't have anything to do with folding specifically. The problem is unlike CPU's there's no way to set a per task priority or affinity. So anytime you do something on the desktop that requires the GPU it's literally fighting for the same resources the folding client wants to use and everything has the same priority level.
 
I was getting lag during browsing (IE 9) and disabled GPU rendering and lag gone. As for Windows Server I believe that hardware acceleration on the videocard is turned down by default so moving the slider up may improve this. I also had other folding issues which were cleared up by changing power management mode in the NVidia control panel to "prefer maximum performance". Every bit helps, fold on brothers and sisters ...
 
Elledan said:
After setting the CPU usage slider in the FAHControl utility to 85% it's somewhat more bearable, though still far from being smooth.
Click to expand...

Maybe a dumb question, but where is this slider located? I just upgraded to the new combined client, and I have been looking everywhere for some way to reduce utilization below 100% on both the CPU and GPU. I am getting ridiculous unplayable lag in Planetside 2 when this is turned on.
 
Dolor said:
Maybe a dumb question, but where is this slider located? I just upgraded to the new combined client, and I have been looking everywhere for some way to reduce utilization below 100% on both the CPU and GPU. I am getting ridiculous unplayable lag in Planetside 2 when this is turned on.
Click to expand...

It's in Configure -> Advanced -> Percent CPU Usage :)

I'd recommend turning off GPU folding at least when playing games, though. I get maybe 10-20% of regular FPS with GPU folding on.

Admittedly suddenly things have become smoother and I do not know why. Aside from when I open Visual Studio and some other apps, videos still play back smoothly and there's no more cursor lag. Very odd indeed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top