More ATI GPUs capable of Folding

Posted at: 12:00am 7th December 2006 by Alex Watson

ATi and Nvidia regularly talk up the power of their GPUs and increasingly they've been claiming their chips will be suitable for other types of processing work apart from crunching pixels, such as in-game physics. While the two companies were quick to coin an atrocious acronym - GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) - to describe these ideas, tangible developments have been rather slower in arriving.

However, owners of Radeon X1900 graphics cards have been able to use their graphics cards to run the Folding@Home distributed computing client, and the organisers of the project at Stanford university have just updated their software so it now works with a much wider range of GPUs. Despite Nvidia announcing that their new GeForce 8800 cards are capable of folding, this update, version 5.91 beta 2 is still restricted to ATi GPUs. Still, if you've got one of the following you can now boost your score:

* X1600, X1800 or X1900 GPUs

However, in their FAQ, the developers make it clear they still prefer the X1900. "1800 cards do not provide the performance seen in X1900's... The R580 [X1900] makes a huge difference in performance - its 48 pixel shaders are key, as we use pixel shaders for our computations."

If you're now using your GPU to fold, let us know in our Folding forum and join the CPC Folding Team. You can download the new GPU Folding client here.

[via Daily Tech]