ATI back in the folding game?

dekez · 4 Apr 2011 at 09:22

Vijay Pande said:
Core 16 for ATI released; also note on NVIDIA GPU support for older boards

In a previous post, I mentioned our plans for supporting ATI GPUs. I'm happy to announce that with the release of v7 into open beta, we have now released ATI core 16 GPU3 WUs into advanced methods for Folding@home. Please see Dr. Lin's forum post for details.

We are doing a gradual rollout of these WUs, for a couple of reasons. First, while this has gone through beta testing, it is still pretty new, so we want to be cautious with its rollout. Second, I would like to add some more servers to help the load. These servers are being delivered today and will likley be on line in a week or two. Depending on the load on the ATI core 16 Work server, we may wait for a full release until the new hardware is on line.

Just a reminder from the previous post that there are some limitations in our ability to support ATI boards. In particular, we're limited to those which support OpenCL 1.1 in order to get any sort of reasonable performance out of the hardware. This means that only 5xxx ATI GPU boards or later will work with the new core 16 (the series 3xxx are not supported and the series 4xxx does not have sufficient OpenCL support). However, we will keep core 11 support going hopefully at least until Sept 1, 2011 in order to support the older hardware.

Also, we are looking at support of older NVIDIA GPUs as well. In particular, there have been reported issues with some 8xxx series boards. We may have to limit their support as well due to analogous hardware compatibility issues.

We're excited to be able to release OpenCL support for ATI GPUs. However, I want to stress that it is still pretty early days for this code, but we're excited about where this is going.

From a scan of other forums it doesn't look like we should all be sticking our nvidia cards in the MM just yet, but if you have ATI gear it's more PPD than previously.

Snapshot · 4 Apr 2011 at 15:49

Just loaded client 7 on my i7 860 PC where it's got a 5750 to play with. Up and running straight away but using 14% CPU. I'll report back later when it's made a bit of progress.

<Later> It's running at about 3' 20" per frame but I've no idea how many points it's worth. I hope I'll be able to untangle its results from my other clients.

Snapshot · 5 Apr 2011 at 10:43

Poo, all that effort for 511 points. Switched off again as not worth the effort.

dekez · 5 Apr 2011 at 12:34

Oh well.

I had a look at the v7 client as well, wasn't very impressed, not as good as the FAH tracker in any case.

Snapshot · 6 Apr 2011 at 06:48

The good thing about the V7 client is that it includes the same functionality as Langouste. The bad bit is that I can't get expert mode to display all the configuration tabs so I can't set up remote clients. I don't know yet if it's me or because the client's still in beta.

dekez · 6 Apr 2011 at 08:32

I couldn't get it to work properly either, I had problems getting the gpu client to run. I'll wait until they've fixed some of the issues before giving it another go.

Biffa · 6 Apr 2011 at 12:20

Its a start, it doubles the output of whatever ATi card you are running (as long as its compatible) and this is with small protein work units, with large ones and bug fixes, the Ati cards should really start to shine.

About time really.

Snapshot · 6 Apr 2011 at 21:14

dekez said:
I couldn't get it to work properly either, I had problems getting the gpu client to run. I'll wait until they've fixed some of the issues before giving it another go.

My problem with C7 literally went away overnight so I can now manage clients remotely. It still doesn't save the remote setup but it works properly when I re-enter the data. I think this is because I installed it for all users rather than just me - a known bug.