Welcome to the foldingforum, Jacko36.Jacko36 wrote:You really have to wonder when ATI cards that support OpenCl have been around for a couple of years now, and which other distributed computing groups report a linear increase in performance, but no effort has been made here to support them.
Then, the new gpu client which ONLY supports nvidia cards is released which just so happens to coincide with the release of the new nvidia cards.
And now all of a sudden there's no wu available for ATI cards.
Maybe money does speak the loudest after all.
This is just how i see it, maybe i'm wrong.
Unfortunately, you're confusing two unrelated issues with each other.
1) I've been trying to find out why few WUs are available and get that problem fixed but I'm not having much success. When new WUs are provided, they disappear rapidly and I have no explanation.
2) There are several topics on this and other forums about OpenCL for FAH. While OpenCL may work for simple tasks, it's still not well enough for FAH. It is poorly optimized and would run so much slower than the existing Brook-CAL version of FahCore_11 that nobody would want it. ATI and the Pande Group and the OpenMM folks all want a good OpenCL core as much or more than you do. They have been working hard to make OpenCL work for FAH but at this point it's still not something that you'd want.
In some respects, you're right about the money -- but don't level that accusation at Stanford or at FAH. NVidia invested in CUDA; ATI did not. Both are investing in OpenCL.
It should be noted that the nVidia core doesn't work for OpenCL either. Not surprisingly, the FAH side of OpenMM that will eventually interface with OpenCL is quite similar to the FAH side of an interface with CUDA, and CUDA is well optimized for nVidia so making the new core work through CUDA is a reasonably small step in the right direction.
If ATI supported CUDA, I'm sure that there would be a new FahCore version that would work with it rather quickly, but I doubt that's going to happen. It has nothing to do with the hardware itself, but rather the investments that nV spent on developing the proprietary CUDA interface. In comparison, ATI's CAL and CTM require the development of much more external software, which is where Brook came in.
ATI can choose to license CUDA from nVidia (at an extremely high price, I'm sure) or the OpenCL folks can develop a version that approaches the efficiency of CUDA, but I don't expect either one very soon. At the present time, ATI is a strong competitor for gaming but is increasingly falling behind in the areas that include stream computing. Hopefully there will be some important developments in that area, but I don't know what they will be or when.
