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Re: Radeon HD 4850: Failed to get assignment from 'assign-GP
Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2012 10:36 pm
by Ivoshiee
As a general rule running of the folding@home client can not be the sole reason to buy a computer. The issue of that thread is clear case why you can not base your buying decisions on "I can fold on it". Maybe you can do it now or you base your hope that you'll get to do it tomorrow. You must base it according to your main computing needs. If it can fold then fine, but there is no need to come around and expect or even demand support for your piece of hardware, it will never happen and only sad outcome is that you are likely having an obsolete computing device at your hands. That is because developing will take time and can even be not so successful as initially fantasised.
Re: Radeon HD 4850: Failed to get assignment from 'assign-GP
Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2012 5:56 pm
by Calendyr
bruce wrote:Calendyr wrote:... Is there any guidelines on how often GPU support is dropped? So for instance if I decide to get a Radeon 5870, do I have to worry about support getting dropped soon? ...
You'll have to ask AMD that question. ATI/AMD has phased out support for the Brook code that FAH has been using in favor of OpenCL and support for OpenCL 1.1 started with the HD 5xxx series. (... and Microsoft is phasing out support for Windows XP.) Stanford can't really support folding code when the company that supplies that software on which FAH depends is no longer supported.
In contrast, NVidia supports CUDA (on which FAH-GPU) is also built and CUDA is supported on NV hardware all the way back to their 8000 series GPUs. As a consequence, FAH can support many older generations of NV GPUs but the ATI GPUs of those same generations can no longer be supported. (At times, the situation has been reversed.)
Decisions like that are made by AMD/NVidia/Microsoft/etc. rather than by Stanford.
Ok, that is a shame, my 4850 is almost 3 times as fast as my 8600 gts and Nvidia still supports it. Oh well. I won a bid on a Gforce 260 GTX so that will replace the 4850 as soon as I receive it.
In the meantime, on my main computer I dropped 2 threads and applied a passkey. I am not sure the passkey is qualifying yet, it has been 2 days, so I doubt it if it takes 10 WU to qualify but I might be wrong. Anyhow, my estimated PPD went from 7500 average to 20,500 average. So that's very encouraging. I can't wait to get to work tomorrow to check the 3 machines there
