anandtech.com — What started out as a simple fixed-function rendering process, where texture and vertex data were fed into a GPU and pixels were pushed out, has evolved into a system where a great deal of processing takes place inside the GPU.
Oct 1, 2006 View in Crawl 4
happyhippyOct 2, 2006
UBUNTU, STOP CLOGGING MY INTERNET PIPES LOLOL DIGG ME UP PLZ.
socokoolaidOct 2, 2006
My Folding@home team is currently ranked 1156 of 45713 Participate and help them find cures <a class="user" href="http://folding.stanford.edu">http://folding.stanford.edu</a>
wooteryOct 2, 2006
"To be fair, it's because ATI sacrificed on developing raw graphical power in exchange for GPGPU functionality", makes a change from going for raw power rather than good drivers.Would have thought AMD would want to keep the graphics processing and central processing apart...
topher06Oct 2, 2006
My only concern is, are GPU's and video cards as robust as CPU's and mainboards.Many people use the same stock fan and heatsink purchased with the video card. If I am going to be running my GPU at near 100% utilization for 24/7, is this adequate? I am sure that ATI only considered people running their GPU at full utilization for a few hours at a time, maybe even a marathon 8 hours or more of gaming, but after some fixed amount of time the game is turned off and the GPU goes to 0% utilization unless its involved in some 2D acceleration. Can today's video cards handle being at peak load for days or even months at a time?I am not going to put my current generation x1900 into that kind of stress because as much as ATI might have given the ability to run general applications on the GPU, I doubt they considered that into the design of their video cards. At near $500 CDN a pop for an X1900 video card, I am sure ATI would love you to burn out your video card every few months running Folding@Home on it.When the average video card nears $100 - $200 and are designed to take long term operation into account (i.e. because of systems like Vista using GPU acceleration require the GPU to always be under load), then I will consider stressing them by using 3rd party applications. For now, I have a problem with stressing out the video card for long term processing because they run way too hot and require too much wattage to be practical and economical for long term processing.
asoggywaffleOct 3, 2006
well if its like the CPU client you can set a maximum amount used so just say use 60% of my GPU all day (i dont know if this is an option or not)
jacks0nOct 5, 2006
no no no. As Whitey04 said, this a great example of GPGPU. As in, a general computing gpu. Gpu's tend to be alot faster at processing than cpu's, however the input must be translated in terms of textures. One day, you'll be able to insert a new graphics card into a PCI-E slot, and your computing power will be twice as fast. Who knows, maybe Nvidia or Ati could end-up in the cpu business..
evoguyOct 6, 2006
ATI's R5xx series was a generation ahead of the GeForce 6x/7x series, so naturally there are more features for generalized computation. All I can say is, wait till G80 vs. R600 before you declare a winner on folding performance... just trust me.