Discussione: Folding@Home
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Old 22-06-2007, 14:08   #10
IllidanRulez
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Iscritto dal: May 2004
Città: Rimini
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fonte: http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html
Quote:
GPU and OS support
Which cards are supported?
We now support serveral classes of GPU boards, including X1600, X1800, and X1900 class GPU's from ATI. At the launch, we supported X1900 cards only. X1800 cards do not provide the performance seen in X1900's and so we strongly recommend X1900 class cards (although we now officially support X1800). X1900 and X1800 cards are actually quite different -- they have different processors (R520, R530 vs. the R580 [in the X1900 series]). The R580 makes a huge difference in performance -- its 48 pixel shaders are key, as we use pixel shaders for our computations. Also note that the card should have more than 256MB (i.e. at least 512MB) of RAM, otherwise the GPU client will put a huge load on the client machine (although we do note that the 256MB X1950Pro using PCIe does work reasonably well).

What about video cards with other (non-ATI) chipsets?
The R580 (in the X1900XT, etc.) performs particularly well for molecular dynamics, due to its 48 pixel shaders. Currently, other cards (such as those from nVidia and other ATI cards) do not perform well enough for our calculations as they have fewer pixel shaders. Also, nVidia cards in general have some technical limitations beyond the number of pixel shaders which makes them perform poorly in our calculations.

Is the GPU client for Windows XP only, or has it been tested on other OS’s like Linux, Mac, and Vista?
We will launch with Windows XP (32 bit only) support only due to driver and compiler support issues. In time, we hope to support Linux as well. Macintosh OSX support is much further out, as the compilers and drivers we need are not supported in OSX, and thus we cannot port our code until that has been resolved.

Are there any plans to enable the client to take advantage of dual-GPU systems like CrossFire, or even 3-slot systems that can support three GPUs?
We will not support this at launch, but we are aggressively working to support multi-GPU systems.
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