ATI’s poor performance in Folding@Home client was mostly due to different hardware capabilities of Radeon X1K, Hd2000, HD3000 and HD4000 series. But after couple of months of hard work on code optimization, ATI managed to crack into the big league, performance-wise.

Today we received the answer a lot of Folding enthusiasts awaited for so long… after making multi-GPU possible on Catalyst 9.2, the latest 9.3 version brings new version of ATI Stream and AMD Display Library SDKs, significantly raising the performance of F@H client.

If you fold and use an ATI card, don’t think – go and download them. If you are enjoying yourself with Windows 7 Beta (for some odd reason, version 7033 works better on my system than RC 7058 – why Microsoft, why you always have superb betas and then SNAFU the final verson?), you’ll be pleased to hear thatas of this month, Catalyst for Windows 7 are entering monthly refresh schedule.

Now, if there is one person who believes Microsoft that Windows 7 is coming out next year, wake up and start preparing for this summer. ; )

The post Catalyst 9.3: ATI now loves Folding@Home appeared first on VR World.

Francisc Kurko, Romania – PALIT GeForce GTX280 graphics card, signed by Jen-Hsun Huang

Winners of 3DMarkVantage retail licenses are:

Radu Neagu, Romania

Boris Romac, Croatia

Jonathan Worrel (Furious Fandango), United States of America

Ivan Faj, Croatia

Nikola Peruncic (McPingvin), Croatia

Chad Hudson (Dragoon1101), United States of America

Nenad Miodrag (nmiodrag), Croatia

Goran Gjura (spikeygoran), Croatia

Eyvind Niklasson, Sweden

Joza Habijan, Croatia

In the end, I wish to congratulate each and every one for competing in PALIT Folding Challenge 2008. I am pleasantly surprised at the effort placed by all members of this small team. Also, bear in mind that the new giveaway is already planned, and this time I will focus on giving as much prizes as possible, with several tweaks in the contest rules. Rest assured, everything that I do will be global, so no exclusions. Everybody is welcome in the group, and as the new site starts to grow, you can be sure there are plenty more surprises. For starters, we’ll make sure that we have a dedicated place for all folders on the site, in the form of site section and forum section.

All winners need to contact me at FoldingChallenge@gmail.com with their shipping address, so that I could organize shipping of prizes.

The post ANNOUNCEMENT: Winners of PALIT Folding Challenge 2008 appeared first on VR World.

As a part of AMD STREAM, ATI will release its own video transcoder for free. Given the limitations and performance that Badaboom has, I wonder did ATI decided to do something more in “formats supported” area.

On the Folding@Home front, there are great expectations from this upcoming driver, especially if you own Radeon 4800 series product. ATI worked hard to remove the driver overhead which keeps the CPU core to 100% per GPU, and as a result, folding smaller proteins should improve by some 20%.

Looking at a bigger picture, ATI’s GPGPU engineers are working night and day on the upcoming OpenCL platform, so the future of CAL and other proprietary standards is up in the air. It is obvious that any pre-4800 hardware suffers from serious drawbacks in the architecture, but 4000 and beyond has the potential to “rock on” in the GPGPU world. Radeon 4000 series finally brought several key features that Nvidia featured from GeForce 8 and beyond, so we are going to have a heated GPGPU battle in 2009.

One thing is certain, though. As soon as Catalyst 8.12 appear (according to our sources, look for Terry “Saint Catalyst Claus” Makedon coming down the chimney around December 10th), go to game.amd.com and download the drivers. There is a myriad of improvements, and you should check out Catalyst 8.12 driver with updated Folding@Home core, currently in version 1.2.1.

You can try the 1.2.1 client right now, but expect a final version showing up around the release of Catalyst 8.12. December is going to be an exciting month for ATI’s F@H community.

The post ATI and Folding working on F@H 1.2.1: Performance, stability updates appeared first on VR World.

When I launched this F@H team, the goal was to reach Top 1000 by the end of 2008, and the goal for this blog was to reach 50,000 visitors by the end of very same calendar year. First goal was achieved with ease and the updated goal is reached even before December started – the goal for 2009 is to reach Top 100 teams, and there are no more goals in 2008. Readers-wise, the site was visited by 44,500 people so far, and the yearly goal seems reachable by the end of this coming week. Once again, I thank you for all the comments given, both positive and negative.

Blog-wise, I am a bit disappointed at myself – I didn’t file as much stories as I planned because the new site consumed almost all of my time. But, have no fear, for next week I did line up more than dozen stories, so you will get 2-3 stories a day. There are couple of reviews in the pipeline as well – Biohazard’s Triple-SLI powered Annihilation machine, Dragon Naturally Speaking 10, Corsair 16 and 32GB sticks, Fallout 3 Good vs. Bad… all good stuff. Given your interest in GDDR5 analysis, I decided to do a technical analysis a week, but I am still looking what technology to cover next. Core i7 architecture seems like a good theme, and there are some confusion surrounding around it.

The good news about the upcoming site is that we passed several major milestones, and there is impressive number of people that decided to join and fight The Good Fight, as Three-Dog Jackson would say (yes, another reference to Fallout 3).

Since our goal is to have integrity above all, the site abides with codes set by International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy the plethora of articles coming from pens of these gifted authors. Our goal is to provide you top-quality content and offer you “old school meets new school” mixture between experience and enthusiasm. The site is going to be launched in time for one of upcoming trade-shows.

On the final note, I’ve redesigned the PALIT Folding Challenge 2008 contest page a bit – added a gallery that will be freshly updated as we pass different Folding@Home milestones.

The post Sunday Wrap-up: Congratulations to the Top 500 Team appeared first on VR World.

Personally, I feel a bit annihilated after today’s 2-hour visit to the dental office. My sins of the past (on racetracks finally caught up with me, and fixing them is no walk in the park. It’s 10PM here and I am shutting down – thanksgiving dinner is over and done for me, it was awesome seeing some old friends (Americans that decided to move to Croatia), even though time difference meant we’re eating dinner while the west coast is waking up.

But nevermind. To the readers in the US, I wish a happy thanksgiving day.

The post Happy Thanksgiving! appeared first on VR World.

You can see who you need to outfold to win a signed GTX280 card by Jen-Hsun. As it stands right now, pole position is in the hands Francisc, of ex-editor of CHIP Magazine from Romania.

Want to check your position or join in? Head over here…

The post Folding@Home Challenge stats now updated daily… appeared first on VR World.

But a lot of time will go on my articles – there are several big ones in the pipeline, just like the GDDR5 Analysis which surprised me with your visits. Usually, Saturday and Sunday are slow days, and my weekly lows always come on weekends. Not this time around, though. Over 3500 visitors came to the site to read the story, and this is the highest number in a day recorded on this blog.

This article proved to me that there is a hunger for long and detailed articles – over the past three years, I was actually teached exactly the opposite – according to my former editors, “nobody reads long articles”. Well, thank you for proving them wrong. You can expect longer pieces from now on, but don’t think I will abandon the news form – there is too much stuff going around.

I also wish to thank some critics that commented the site as “dropping the ball grammar-wise”. I am now speaking Croatian more than I did in the past year (lived in California), so I find myself in situations where I don’t have a word in croatian to express what i wanted to say. From the other hand, writing in english brings some grammar from croatian – promise I’ll be more careful in the future. Pioneer’s honor.

As a final comment for this weekly closure, I wish to thank all of the people in my folding team. Daily production skyrocketed to 170,000 points and we’re on track to reach 200,000 points on a daily basis. We’ve passed the three million mark on Friday, and now are on course in reaching Top 500 teams during the course of next week. Since my goal was to reach Top 1000 by the end of 2008, needless to say how enthusiastic I am. This coming week, you can expect several articles in regards to folding, hopefully you’ll find them interesting.

Thank you for reading.

The post Sunday Blurb: Slow week ahead. Or not… appeared first on VR World.

The interview was focusing on Bjorn3D’s noteworthy Folding@Home effort (the team is on track to crack into Top100), thus Michael gave some interesting thoughts, such as this one.

There are a lot of very good guides out there that will walk users through the required steps to fold with multiple GPUs like the ones on HardOCP or overclockers.co.uk, just not in SLI mode yet.
NVIDIA SLI is a great extension to parallel processing and we’re looking at methods to take advantage of it with Folding@home. Stay tuned.

As you can read for yourself, there is a lot of things that Nvidia wants to do with Folding@Home. ATI is currently working on own reshuffling, but at the end of the day, whoever makes the best GPU for protein folding, always have a higher goal in your mind.
In my own opinion, Folding@Home is purest form of “pay it forward”, because GPUs helped scientists to accelerate their research measured in human generations. Couple of months ago, I spoke to Vijay and he said that GPU’s accelerated the protein research by some 30 years. Let’s hope that ATI and Nvidia can decrease that by additional 20-30-40 years to real-time levels.
Currently, most powerful ATI and Nvidia GPUs are folding in the range of 300-600 nanoseconds/day. Achieving a second per day is something I am looking forward to. In 10 years time, we’ll hopefully be at 1 hour of protein life/day on GPUs.
Just to help you calculate, 1TFLOPS of computing power would calculate 1 milisecond of protein life PER DAY. For one second of protein life per day, we need 1PFLOPS. Thus, even PFLOPS GPUs could not calculate real-time.
Anyways, you can read the interview here, and regardless of where you are, I am inviting you to join Folding@Home project. My team number is 69864, but you’re more than welcome to join any team, or even stay outside teams. But we need your idle computing power. If you feel up to contributing a little, consider Folding@Home.

The post Nvidia to bring SLI support for Folding@Home appeared first on VR World.

What happened is that today, five weeks into blog’s existence – the site was visited by 25,500 people, and shows stable growth. Folding@Home team exceeded all expectations and is now on track of ending the year firmly in Top 350, maybe even in Top 300.
Anyway, there’s no stopping now, I will continue to file 2-3 news stories on daily basis (will try to do more, but…), I wish to thank you for visits and comments (if you made any – I hope I didn’t make it difficult to comment – just type your name, e-mail and you’re all set).
Of course, if you have any feedback or suggestion, just let me know.

The post Silver anniversary: big thanks to the first 25K appeared first on VR World.

The number that will decide the winner: Most points in a month, or PPM

As you can see, Francisc from Romania is leading the race, followed by Boris Romac from Croatia. Third place is a virtual tie between Ivan Faj and Nikola Peruncic, both from Croatia.
Good luck to all folders.

The post Sunday Update: Folding@Home Challenge appeared first on VR World.

PALIT Multimedia Folding@Home Challenge 2008

(Yes, I know it’s a long name, sorry ;))

I’ve set up a page on this blog that has all the details about the challenge, and I invite you to join in.
The awards are (hopefully) tempting – Palit GeForce GTX280 board signed by no other than Jen-Hsun Huang, triple-C of nVIDIA Corporation (Co-founder, Chairman, CEO) and 10 licenses of 3DMarkVantage Advanced Edition. There are no territorial limits, so you can join in from anywhere

I want to express my gratitude to David Makin from PALIT Multimedia North America, Oliver Baltuch, President of Futuremark Corporation and Andrew Humber from nVIDIA Corporation. More details about the contest are available on the link above – or just click here.

UPDATE: No, I am not competing for the board. I was asked this in couple of e-mails, and to make matters clear I’ve updated the rules as well.

The post UPDATED: Folding@Home Challenge 2008 appeared first on VR World.

A small blog, but a big heart from its folding members - thank you guys!

As a second big thing I can inform you that with the dying hour of October, Folding@Home team 69864 (a.k.a. The Bright Side of IT) broke into Top 1000 teams. Even though there is only 18 active members, we’re almost all GPU powered and we managed to fold more than 4100 units, averaging 40K PPD (Points Per Day). But, the story does not end here. Given the fact that my personal wish for 2008 was exceeded two months before the year ended, my next target is that this team breaks into Top 500 by the end of the year.
Again, if you want to join us, you’re very welcome.
On a personal note, I will be moving from Mountain House to San Francisco (temporarily) this weekend, so there could be lack of updates on the blog. Due to my “fiscal outlook”, it seems that I will have to spend the winter in Croatia, but who knows where I’ll end up. All I know is that I want to give you the best information out there, and hopefully the new company will do just that.

Anyways, I will do my best to have articles ready for Monday… as I have an exciting week ahead.

The post A big thank you: 6K visitors, Top 1000 F@H Team appeared first on VR World.

The motherboard for the ultimate workstation

The board supports both SLI and CrossFire in their respective maximum configurations (3 or 4 GPUs), but what makes this board really interesting is the fact that you could connect 12 LCD displays on it, or create a GPGPU/rendering/scientific/folding farm in a single case. Putting six ATI Radeon 4850 graphics cards would enable roughly 6TFLOPS of computing power. In case of Nvidia, you would have to pick up GeForce 9800GT (Palit has single-slot 1GB card) and have less theoretical computing power, but in terms of folding, you would be looking at 30-35.000 PPD system (at a cost of two GTX260 cards).
This is really impressive engineering feat from ASUS, with the only disappointment being usage of RealTek GbE controller. For a workstation motherboard, I would much happier if Marvell was on-board.
Storage-wise, you can install no less than eight SATA devices and not a single IDE device, since ASUS stayed in “Revolution” theme and killed of the PATA connector. Also, I found that a shared PS/2 port was also pretty neat solution, even though real revolution would be killing both PS/2 slots. This way, you still have one legacy part: PS/2.

There is one shared PS/2 port, for either keyboard or a mouse

Funny part of this story is that if anybody would have a time machine and go back to IBM engineers in 1986-7 frame and told them that only remain of their failed standard is going to be a keyboard/mouse connector, and that PS/2 connector will outlive PATA, I guess they would call you… crazy? Lunatic? Infidel?

P.S. If you’re wondering… yes, the answer is true. There are no technical issues that would prevent you from installing 3-Way SLI and 4-Way CrossFireX setup, consisting out of three GTX280 and two 4870X2 cards. Only problem is that you would have to have a watercooling setup, since you are limited to single-slot cooling solutions. I guess Asetek, CoolIT or somebody similar could come up with a solution for this “problem”.

The post ASUS kills PATA and PCI standards! appeared first on VR World.

Nvidia's client may not look as nice as ATI one, but it's the efficiency that counts...

Fast forward to GTX280 launch and the Vijay Pande team debuted the Folding@Home client for Nvidia chips as well. Nvidia and ATI lead a short marketing war who can fold better and things went quiet… apparently, for a reason.
The reason why things went quiet is probably the “inconvenient truth”: ATI showed up with Radeon 4800 series and demolished Nvidia’s dominance in the segment, with GTX260 and 280 going through radical price drops in order to stay competitive. However, ATI’s Radeon 4800 series has one field where the card is losing against 5-10x cheaper cards: Folding@Home.
The 10x argument lies in comparison between current ATI’s flagship, the  Radeon 4870X2 and Nvidia’s GeForce 9600GSO. This $50 card can easily out-fold ATI Radeon 4870X2, which retails for more than 500 USD/450EUR in respective markets.
In the past weeks, I’ve conducted a series of tests with various graphics cards (all that I own or could put my hands on), and the results were quite depressing if you own an ATI card. I’ve asked some of my contacts in AMD why the performance is so bad and the answers were ranging from “we wanted to make best gamer’s card, not a card for Folding” to sad silence. It seems to me that the difference lies in shader type and clock: ATI’s R6xx and RV7xx architecture lies around big fat units and lot of tiny ones (64+256 in case of Radeon 3800, 80+720 in case of Radeon 4800), and the clock is much lower than in case with GeForce cards. At the same time, Nvidia went the other route and came up with large number of “fat” units, while the company didn’t even count the “thin” (MADD) ones.
When we compare the GTX280 and 4870X2, comparisons are just astounding: in a period of a month, EVGA’s GTX280 SSC achieved an average of 6,802 points per day, while ATI Radeon 4870X2 managed puny 3,870 ppd. At the same time, I’ve witnessed higher PPD scores achieved even by two-year old GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB, which was quite a surprise. Around two weeks ago, I started following PPD numbers using FahMon on a large number of systems that mostly bear the same configuration: dua-core processor or more, 2GB system memory or more and the graphics cards. In all cases, with the help of my friends, I’ve managed to check FahMon and KakaoStats for rougly 25 cards and came to a surprising result.
With the recent update to the GPU2 client and new Fah_Core11.exe (ATI uses v1.17, Nvidia v1.15), the community witnessed further fall in number of completed packets per day. If you’re not familiar with Folding@Home packets, every package features certain number of mathematical simulations for tested protein – in case of Nvidia, packet consists out of 25 million, while ATI’s one features 10 million operations. However, due do different type of mathematical operations, Nvidia’s packet usually will result in 480 points, while ATI’s 10 million will return 548 points (or recently introduced ATI packets with 338 points).
Like I previously wrote, the table below is not the result of one packet score and Excel calculation, but rather continuous number crunching over the course of several weeks, with one week used for measurement.

Improvised Top 20 Folding@Home GPUs:

1. Nvidia GeForce GTX280 1GB (EVGA SSC)
2. Nvidia GeForce GTX260-216 898MB (EVGA SSC)
3. Nvidia GeForce GTX260 898MB (EVGA Superclocked)
4. Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX+ 512MB (ASUS TOP)
5. Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 SDI 768MB (PNY)
6. Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX 512MB (ASUS TOP)
7. Nvidia GeForce 8800GTX 768MB (Zotac AMP! Edition)
8. Nvidia GeForce 8800Ultra 768MB (XFX XXX Edition)
9. Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS 512MB (Gainward)
10. Nvidia GeForce 8800GT 512MB (Gainward)
11. Nvidia GeForce 9600GSO 768MB (EVGA)
12. Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (LeadTek)
13. ATI Radeon 4870X2 2GB (PowerColor)
14. ATI Radeon 4870 512MB (PALIT)
15. Nvidia GeForce 9600GT 256MB (Zotac)
16. ATI Radeon 4850 512MB (PALIT)
17. ATI Radeon 3870 512MB (Sapphire Atomic)
18. ATI FireGL V8600 1GB (ATI)
19. Nvidia GeForce 8600GTS 256MB (XFX XXX Edition)
20. ATI Radeon 3850 256MB (Sapphire)

This is not a complete table by no means, since I am missing several new GPUs. But in this one, as you can see for yourself – results are quite dramatic for the red team. Two year old GeForce GPUs demolished otherwise-brilliant Radeon series, and it is incredible that even GeForce 9600 will outfold Radeon 4850. This is a rude wake-up call for guys at Markham, because this is just unbelievable.
Personally, I am running a combination of AMD Spider platform (9850BE + 790GX + ATI Radeon 4870X2) and hybrid Intel’s V8-Skulltrail platform with Quadro FX 4600 SDI.
Of course, everything can be changed with a simple driver update. I don’t understand what happened with AMD/ATI, company that lead the field of GPGPU computing for so long – why should AMD work on optimizing Folding@Home client… I am aware that AMD poached Mike Houston from Stanford to work on Brooke+ and now OpenCL APIs, but surely the performance didn’t went downhill from the influence of just one person. Or just maybe…
Overall, I hope that Catalyst 8.11 or 8.12 will bring more performance for ATI cards, since I do not believe that it would be so hard to optimize drivers for GPGPU/GPU Computing usage. For now, in Folding@Home, ATI is complete washout.

For the end of this article, if you find that your GPU cycles could be used for something good, I invite you to read the following article and join F@H family, regardless of what client (CPU or GPU) or team you choose in the end. Intel, AMD, ATI, Nvidia, Windows, Linux or Mac OS – it does not matter, just join – If you want, of course.

The post Nvidia’s $50 card destroys ATI’s $500 one or “Why ATI sucks in Folding?” appeared first on VR World.

Initial option screen... put your name in, and the group is 69864 ;-)

If you have 256MB or more video memory, check this box

MachineID is important if you plan to run more than one client (multi-GPU setups, CPU/GPU combo etc.)

After configuration, you’re good to go. The stats page is located at KakaoStats.com – yes, Kakao means Cocoa in Croatian ;-). You can also see the official one here, but the official stats page isn’t always available, since F@H servers suffer from tremendous load.
Let’s fold together and hopefully simulate enough nanoseconds that become seconds that become minutes, hours, days, years… who knows, our CPU or GPU time might help scientists tofind cure for Alzheimer or Parkison’s disease (focus of F@H group at Stanford). We might even help ourselves in the future.

Unofficial stats over at KakaoStats.com - enjoy this one even if you don't use our group #.

Pay it forward. You’re free to ping me at theo.valich @ gmail.com for a chat or if you have any questions. Always glad to help

The post Folding@Home team update, new stats page ;) appeared first on VR World.