Maybe very earlier I saw somewhere here that R@H crunching takes gpu strength, how much gpu upgrade help for the crunch like GDDR2 for what % increase, GDDR3 for %? or 512mb gpu? etc. my current gpu is old fx5500 basically for dvd watching & internetting but crunch r@h in the background.

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R@H does not use the GPU at all. If you use an integrated GPU, it will typically take some system RAM and this may have a very small performance impact.

In most cases, a graphics card does not improve R@H at all. Many of us continue to wait for a version of R@H that will take advantage of the powerful and inexpensive GPUs.

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Thx!

Paul

Though the GPU in modern computers has computing power that may exceed the CPU's, it is often of the "wrong" type. The processor in the GPU is optimized to do computation tasks required to put images on the screen.

It is possible that one of these days we will see a project that may use the GPU to boost computing processes. But, it is a whole new can of worms to move the problem from the main system to the graphics card, process that work and then get the result back to the main system. The whole intent of the graphics card is to put the results up on the screen.

I think it would make for a psychedelic display to watch the processing ... but, of course, you would not be able to then use that computer for any other work while it was processing ...

In the days of mainframes and minicomputers with CPUs made up of many chips to attach a pair Digital to Analog converter to the address bus and then display the output on a 'scope ... then you could watch the processing (you could still to it if you were interested I suppose but it would be main memory addressing you would be watching, not CPU processing) as it accessed memory locations.

The technicians could see when the CPU went off the rails by seeing an "abnormal" trace on the screen. I used to do the same thing by listening to the computers as they accessed the hard drives. I you know the system, you can tell when something "bad" happens because the way the system access the disks changes ... but I digress ...

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Just as you can use a PS3 and its Cell BE (with 6 SPEs available for crunching), Folding@Home also allows you to use gpu's. Currently ati x19xx series, although they are testing the newer 27xx, and hopefully 38xx series as well:

April 03, 2008
GPU2 update

We've internally dubbed the new GPU client/core "GPU2". Here's an update. The GPU2 closed beta testing has been moving along well. There are a few bugs which have shown up, but nothing we'd call "showstoppers" just yet. The beta test is outside of Stanford and ATI now. If all looks good, we plan to next have a completely open beta.

March 03, 2008
GPU core beta test broadening

We're starting to broaden our beta test for the GPU client. You may from time to time see 27xx class project numbers appear on the Project Summary page -- these are the new GPU test projects we're running.

So far, so good. We're working with ATI to work out a clean way to bundle what we need for the new client, finishing up some tests at ATI, and then we should be in good shape for a more broad (but still closed) GPU beta test.

Just as you can use a PS3 and its Cell BE (with 6 SPEs available for crunching), Folding@Home also allows you to use gpu's. Currently ati x19xx series, although they are testing the newer 27xx, and hopefully 38xx series as well

However, to do so, don't you have to run it under their framework?

Not sure, I don't see a mention of BOINC and if they can co-exist on one machine or not ...

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Haven't done this myself (yet!), so I will not claim to have the definitive answer, but I don't see why not...

F@H gpu will run under Windoze, as will Boinc.

So, with a multicore cpu, for F@H you would designate one core per gpu card (i.e., 2 out of 4 cores if you had a quadcore with crossfire), and the remainder of the cores could be utilized by Boinc.

GPU crunching DOES require more babysitting than perhaps Boinc's "set it and forget it", but where there's a will, there's a way...