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ATI releases new Folding@home driver
Officially supports Radeon HD 2000 and 3000-series GPUs in Stanford’s new GPU folding client
Many hardcore folders have been waiting for the day when DirectX 10 GPUs became capable of folding, and both Stanford and AMD have now heard your cries. Those of you who regularly check out our Folding forum will know that Stanford released a BETA of the new GPU client this time last week, but ATI has now added official support with its latest Catalyst 8.4 driver.
Owners of Radeon HD 2400 GPUs and higher, or Radeon HD 3400 GPUs and higher, can download the folding client from here and the new driver from here. However, ATI notes that there are still some issues with the client. It doesn’t support CrossFire multi-GPU configurations yet, and ATI says that ‘crashes can occur when running the new beta GPU Folding@Home client concurrently with 3D applications or playing back video content.’
Tests of the client on Stanford’s forums also suggest that the new GPU client doesn’t use all of the GPU, and is CPU limited to a certain extent. A machine with a Radeon HD 2900XT and a Core 2 Q6600 at stock speed produced 1,310 points a day, but this increased to 2,100 points a day when the CPU was overclocked to 3.8GHz.
As well as official support for the new GPU folding client, Catalyst 8.4 also contains some other fixes. These include adding the ability to enable anti-aliasing via the Catalyst Control Center when playing games using the Unreal Engine 3, and you can now also max out the settings in Company of Heroes without your machine exiting to the Desktop. The driver also fixes issues in Crysis after setting the 3D settings to Optimal quality in the Catalyst Control Center.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project that simulates how proteins fold for the purposes of medical research. By getting thousands of people to donate their spare CPU cycles to the project, Stanford university hopes to help find cures for Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. You can help the project by downloading the client, and joining Custom PC’s world-leading folding team by using the id 35947.
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MMMmmmm... Really Now...
Comment by NikoBellic at 2:28pm 22nd April 2008
is AMD giving us a clue tooooo future profits . is AMD giving away its future prospects . alll this talk of FOLDING is not tooooo good . IS AMD OR ATi about toooooo FOLD ? into the past Qtrs I am not a fanboy of anyone so i dont care .
Comment by kingjohn721 at 9:35pm 21st April 2008
its not that they don't allow it on their cards. it says in the forums or on the FAQs that ATI cards are just better at folding and have the raw power. shame i'm just getting .dll errors with this thought. time to reinstall
Comment by benji182 at 2:54pm 17th April 2008
QUOTE:"In answer to NikoBellic - We could do, but we should also slag off Nvidia for not allowing FAH oin their cards. Out of interest, my PS3 folds very nisely and thats Nvidia based isn't it? And it uses the graphics chip to fold I believe, so it can be done. Come on Nvidia, I want my 8800Gt to fold." No my friend you are wrong, the PS3 F@H client, does not use the Nvidia GPU at all. Its all based on using the Cell CPU. If it used the 7x00 series based GPU the PS3 has it wouldnt get nowhere near the amount of points its is getting.
Comment by CPC_RedDawn at 1:59pm 17th April 2008
good point!!!... just a shame the PS3 sounds like an Hoover when we run F@H on it
Comment by NikoBellic at 12:59pm 17th April 2008
In answer to NikoBellic - We could do, but we should also slag off Nvidia for not allowing FAH oin their cards. Out of interest, my PS3 folds very nisely and thats Nvidia based isn't it? And it uses the graphics chip to fold I believe, so it can be done. Come on Nvidia, I want my 8800Gt to fold.
Comment by do_it_anyway at 12:45pm 17th April 2008
ATI might be slower but at least they are doing something to help. All we need now is a free 3780 for each CPC F@H member and we might just keep of the comp. WillEye
Comment by The_Real_WillEye at 12:15pm 17th April 2008
This is the part where we slag off ATI for having slower cards than Nvidia
Comment by NikoBellic at 10:54am 17th April 2008
Sorry, Custom PC comments are now closed.
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