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Nvidia GPUs responsible for 42% of Folding@home output
The green team’s graphics chips are contributing 1,428 TFLOPS of processing power, according to the latest stats
Members of Custom PC’s Folding@home team may have noticed a major increase in our production rate recentlys, and there’s little doubt that much of this can be attributed to Stanford’s new GPU2 client for Nvidia and ATI GPUs. However, it looks as though Nvidia GPUs are the king of the folding castle at the moment, as they’re currently responsible for a whopping 42 per cent of the project’s total output.
This is despite the fact that over three times as many active PlayStation 3s as there are Nvidia GPUs contributing to the project, not to mention 16 times as many CPUs folding under Windows. There are currently 12,982 Nvidia GPUs actively folding, out of a total of 323,424 active processors in total. As such, the fact that Nvidia GPUs make up such a colossal percentage of the total output is pretty incredible.
You can see the current statistics on the next page, showing that Nvidia GPUs are currently churning out 1,428 TFLOPS out of a total of 3,372 TFLOPS for the whole project. Meanwhile, ATI GPUs are responsible for 404 TFLOPS, but even this is double the output from Windows CPU clients, and is an impressive figure considering that there are only 3,677 ATI GPUs actively folding at the moment.
Speaking to Custom PC, the director and founder of the Folding@home project, Vijay Pande, explained that ‘in terms of raw performance, Nvidia is doing a bit better, but there are different metrics for performance. In terms of performance overall, the GTX 280 is a very powerful board, but it’s also a very expensive board. So, in terms of the amount of calculations per dollar, you could buy one GTX 280 or three ATI 4870s, or maybe four, at the same cost.’
Pande is especially pleased with the results from Nvidia GPUs, though, saying ‘as these statistics show, the impact of Nvidia GPUs on protein folding simulations has been extraordinary. Teams that are folding with Nvidia GPUs are seeing huge boosts to their production and this is helping to accelerate the project significantly.’
Nvidia is also chuffed with the results. Nvidia’s general manager of visual consumer solution, Michael Steele, said that ‘I know everyone at Nvidia has been closely tracking the progress of the Folding@home project since the release of the CUDA port for our GPUs, and we are delighted to see them making such a significant and meaningful contribution to what is extremely valuable work.’
If you’ve got an Nvidia GeForce 8000-series GPU or above, or an ATI Radeon HD 2000-series GPU or above, then you could download Stanford’s GPU2 client and get it folding for team Custom PC, which is currently at number 7 on the world leaderboard.
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Interesting to see that both the Ati and Nvidia GPUs produce the same points/GPU. Probably due to the fact that although the recent Ati GPUs have the raw power advantage, the client also works on far older Ati GPUs than it does Nvidia ones, which will be slower and bring down the average.
Comment by NotFred at 10:19am 27th August 2008
Since Nvidia have been the preferred choice on cost and performance over the past few years. Now the 4xxx series ATi cards seem to be the flavour of the month (Why?) the ATi fanboys might push their figures up in the coming months.
Comment by crazyceo at 10:10am 27th August 2008
well, if you look at the TFLOPS/GPU, both produce about 11%...but still a good result for Nvidia
Comment by gcd_638000846b0f at 9:58am 27th August 2008
GPUs are floating point monsters. this news is hardly any surprise. even a very low end GPU has more trannies dedicated to pure logic than any CPU including nehalem which is mostly just cache. i suppose the news is merely being used as a tool by nvidia what with their ongoing PR war against intel and the CPU
Comment by vulcanproject at 12:17am 27th August 2008
Well how can all the good news be from Nvidia as Ati have been doing this since they had the x1900 cards thats right pre streem processor days they must have loads of calculation time on Nvidia.
Comment by Cool_CR at 11:53pm 26th August 2008
but on a different subject... isn't folding trendy enough for the MAC crowd? Why aren't they doing their bit for science... miserable gits.
Comment by NewParadigm at 10:51pm 26th August 2008
Get a life. The reason why it is 42% because they have made better hardware, people are more interested in purchasing it and it operating. cjagusz - The NVIDIA GPU failure is old news, much like your life.
Comment by Syzygy2005 at 10:27pm 26th August 2008
ATI's GPUs have practically the same FLOPS/processor ratio.
Comment by blazinglory at 8:32pm 26th August 2008
.... folding might be useful in determining whether your card hasn't been manufactured properly.... hopefully within the warranty period! :-)
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Nvidia-GPU-failure,news-29026.html
Comment by cjagusz at 8:06pm 26th August 2008
In a year or so when I upgrade my PC I'll start folding again. As it is I can't justify the power bill for the pathetic amount of points a 2.6 ghz Athlon 64 will give.
Comment by l3v1ck at 7:45pm 26th August 2008
theese people (and actualy my self), are folding not for 'numbers', we are trying to help science (as much as we can).
Comment by GeForce at 7:34pm 26th August 2008
um.. the entire contents of the CPC folding forum? this is truly amazing, such a tiny amount of hardware can whack out so many points!!
Comment by soddit113 at 6:58pm 26th August 2008
Comment deleted by moderator. Please maintain a friendly, helpful and constructive tone.
Comment by higson92 at 6:54pm 26th August 2008
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