Impact of FF4 on GPU Folding

[PantherX]

Firefox will launch the 4th BETA on Monday and this release will include the GPU acceleration that might make browsing faster (not sure if it will be on by default) However, I am concerned if it would have any negative impact on GPU folding:

Virtually no impact = TPF increases by 1 to 5 seconds (total delay of up to 8.33 minutes)
Moderate impact = TPF increases by 5 to 15 seconds (total delay of up to 25 minutes)
Significant impact = TPF increases by >15 seconds (total delay >25 minutes)

FF4B4 details

Since there is a large variety of GPUs, it would be interesting to see what effect it has on folding and if there is any relationship.

[P5-133XL]

I don't think it will affect folding hardly at all, but rather the reverse where folding will impact your browsing experience.

Browsing is a pulsed activity where you do nothing for large time blocks and then you will refresh a page and then there is lots of activity for a short time period. Humans are slow and as such the total amount of processing activity will be low. For the same reason you don't really need a high performance CPU to browse the web. As such the impact on folding which is continuous will be relatively minimal.

On the otherhand, if you take the browsing processing usage which is interrupt driven so you have exclusive use of the CPU and then give it to your GPU which is totally subscribed to and has no interrupt capability and you are going to find that those pages render very slowly compared to what you were used to. It will be like gaming while folding - a very bad experience.

[7im]

You might want to adjust the poll so that people can only pick one option.

[PantherX]

@P5-133XL: So an accurate analogy is - When you are watching a video/playing games, the video/game stutters while folding going on. That part is correct and I understand that. However, if I were watching a video, the TPF would increase by ~3 Seconds. While that isn't much, I was wondering if there could be a similar effect when using FF4. I guess we have to wait and see what the final results are.

@7im: Thanks, I mistook that field as something else.

[codysluder]

Watching a video is a continuous process. Browsing renders at most one page every few seconds, depending on that slow human with the mouse (and mentioned by P5-133XL). Your video might get choppy and it also might slow down FAH during the time you're watching it due to contention for the gpu. Browsing, OTOH, is always choppy so variations in the choppiness is hard to measure.

Of course we're also talking about two different things: The impact of FAH on another gpu application and the impact of another gpu application on FAH.

[k1wi]

At least on the FF4.4 BETA GPU acceleration will be left OFF by default.

[7im]

I don't think it matters if this feature is used or not.

People who dedicate a machine to folding aren't surfing on the machine, so no impact.

And people who do surf and use the machine for more than just folding also understand there will be a slight impact on folding anyway. So any drop in folding performance is a given, and they don't really care.

So no big deal either way.