Folding Forum

I have a machine running ATI and NVidia cards. The ATI card is a FirePro 2460. Its not the most powerful, but is designed to run four displays. After installing the latest client, it found the card and assigned work unit to it, however the card will not finish the WU within the preferred or final deadline. perhaps the card/software should look at what the system estimate is and prevent a WU from being assigned if it won't complete on time?



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Thanks,

K.

One thing of note, all ATI video cards need a CPU core all on its own. Running SMP:8 will over-subscribe the CPU unless you have a CPU with 9+ cores. You may find that either running SMP:6 (SMP:7 will cause some WU's to crash so it is not recommended) or not running your Firepro 2460 (I suspect that that would be the prefered option if it can't complete WU's in a timely fashion) will significantly improve your overall productivity.

The SMP threads are highly synchronized and are designed to suspend threads if there is a demand for CPU processing. Since the ATI video card uses a CPU core, the SMP will suspend a thread to allow it to run. However, because the SMP threads are synchronized with each other suspending one thread will cause the other threads to sit in an idle loop waiting for the thread to reactivate. It is better not to use all your cores (especially the hyper-threaded virtual processors) then to have one thread even intermittantly suspended.

csystems wrote:I have a machine running ATI and NVidia cards. The ATI card is a FirePro 2460. Its not the most powerful, but is designed to run four displays. After installing the latest client, it found the card and assigned work unit to it, however the card will not finish the WU within the preferred or final deadline. perhaps the card/software should look at what the system estimate is and prevent a WU from being assigned if it won't complete on time?

Welcome to foldingofrorum.org, csystems.

There is some degree of assignment tailoring but not a lot. It works pretty well for SMP assignments which can be assigned based on the number of CPU-cores that you have but it's a lot harder with GPUs. In your case, as already has been noted, your AMD GPU is most likely not performing up to expectations because it is being starved for work. AMD had designed their drivers based on an assumption that there will always be a free CPU that can send/receive data between the GPU and main RAM and you're not operating it that way. As P5-133XL has suggested, changing SMP:8 to SMP:6 will reduce SMP performance somewhat (not as much as you might think) and increase the performance of your AMD GPU.

Depending on the relative speed of the GPU compared to your CPU, you may be better off (A) Running SMP:6 plus the GPU, or (B) Running SMP:8 and suspending folding on that GPU. As has been suggested, that choice is entirely up to you. (The drivers for NVidia GPUs don't have the same problem.) I don't fold on my Cedar since it only has 80 SPs but that might very well not apply to you, depending on your CPU.

Which version of Windows are you running? Which CPU do you have?

Depending on which CPU you have running in SMP8, dropping down to SMP6 + the AMD card may not provide any increase in productivity for you. Something to play around with/think about.

The model I looked at on Newegg had 512mb of vram and with just that much it may run out of available memory with folding + any other applications using any vram. That may cause some WU crashes, at least it was a theory by someone here. (bruce maybe??)