Desire to use GPUs without using ALL the GPU

[securitywyrm]

I have a computer with a pair of GTX 560 TI GPUs. However at anything less than 'full' processing power, both GPUs stay idle. Since a lot of what I'm doing at this computer is just basic office programs, I'd like to be able to turn the GPUs on for Folding@home. So far the only way to get the GPUs active is to set processing power to Full, but this prevents me from doing anything else with the computer due to the mouse moving slowly and programs not responding.

Is there a way to set folding@home to utilize the GPUs without trying to push everything to the limit? I'm not going to be running this program overnight, but I could see myself running this when doing simple stuff. I'd be comfortable pushing it halfway to the limit and leaving the other half for my personal use.

[P5-133XL]

The lag you are seeing is exactly why the default is run them only at idle.

Identify which slot is using your primary video card then you can configure Advanced Control to remove that slot. Then you should be able to utilize your non-primary GPU without excessive lag while running in full mode.

To figure out which slot is using your primary video card run in full mode (make sure both GPU's are fully running and lag exists) and startup Advanced Control (right-click the folding systray icon) then right-click one GPU slot and choose pause. If the lag goes away, then that is your primary video card and that is the slot you will remove. If it didn't stop the lag then it is your other GPU slot that is the primary.

[securitywyrm]

Awesome. I'll give this a try and see how the temperature is. So long as it doesn't push the used card too hard and it doesn't significantly impact my system performance and heat generation, I'll be running the program a lot to make use of those extra processing cycles. Right now I'm just seeing a slight bit of input lag.

[bruce]

Everybody who writes a application that can use the GPU pretty much assumes it's much faster than the CPU (mostly true) and that it's not used by anything else (sometimes true and sometimes not--false if FAH is using it). Your browser probably has a setting that can disable the GPU for tasks that used to always run on the CPU. Windows 7 had the same setting (not sure about Win8). Video rendering used to only be done on CPUs and you can probably find a setting that does that, too.

It takes some research, but if you figure out what screen lag you notice and what screen lag doesn't matter to you, you may be able to switch that processing to the CPU. Even though the CPU will process it slower, the task will interrupt whatever else the CPU is doing and start processing it immediately. Without a GPU task scheduler, it will have to wait for FAH to release the resources, often waiting longer to start processing than it takes the CPU to finish the same work. It's a delicate bit of system tuning, but if you want to spend the time, it may help more than trying to share the primary GPU on a FIFO basis.