Folding Forum

Hello

I am a recent donor who decided to shut down my bitcoin mining operation via GPU due to increasing difficulty, and I also don't feel like going towards litecoin. I figured some charity might be a better endeavor for now.

I'm having an issue with desktop frame rates being low (scrolling and gaming laggy while folding). I do use my machine for everything from browsing to gaming and require the folding to take a back seat when these things are going on. With bitcoin mining I could set a flag in the mining program (-frames 60) which would slightly reduce the output of the GPU, but force the GPU to always update the monitors at 60 FPS regardless of the demand the miner would require.

Unless some of you replying are not already aware, setting the "Folding Power" slider to anything other than "High" will shut down GPU folding.

Is it possible to force this with the folding application? If not, this should be added! I'm sure it would be an easy feature to implement. It's no fun owning a high power machine and then have it lag.

No, sorry but there is no current way of prioritizing and interrupting the GPU subsystem. Folding allocates big chunks of resources of the video subsystem. Since there is no way to interrupt or even prioritize GPU tasks, the screen ends up waiting for the folding chunk to finish producing the effect of lag. With recent advent of GPGPU, I suspect that someday the HW manufacturers, OS manufacturers, and the drivers will interact and create a priority and interrupt system for the video subsystem but until then folding is going to lag the machine.

Until then we have instituted several solutions to deal with lag with v7. The first is the default medium power setting that will wait to GPU fold till the machine is idle. There is also a screensaver that will do the same. If you need more granularity then you can manually pause and unpause individual slots. If you have multiple GPU's you can also dedicate one to the screen and fold on any remaining but do note that configuring multiple GPU's can be challenging.

Welcome to the folding forum.

Actually, adding this kind of feature has been attempted and the results were not particularly good. So, currently that type of throttling of the GPU processing is not available. Instead the decision was made to make it relatively easy to setup the client so it would only engage either CPU and/or GPU folding when the system was not in use otherwise. The V7 Intermediate FAQ has a grid that shows how the different settings will utilize a system here. For all settings other than Off and Full, GPU folding will start once the system is in an Idle state.

What determines the Idle state depends on the OS and some other settings. From the V7 Introduction page:

The software uses several different methods for determining if the system is idle. In Windows, if there’s no user input on the mouse or keyboard for a while (the exact timing depends on the system’s configuration) the FAH screensaver can activate, the power management settings can turn off the monitor, or Windows can decide that it’s in “away mode”, whichever comes first. In Mac OS X, the system is idle if there’s no user activity for around five minutes. In Linux, the screensaver and a lack of user input are used to determine idleness.

Let me relate this to a bit of relevant history for a better perspective.

In the early days of PCs, there was no such thing as virtual memory or, for that matter, such a thing as multiprogramming. As hardware developed, so did Operating Systems and when FAH was introduced, some dozen years ago, it was not unreasonable to fold with your CPU (if you had enough RAM) the OS could interrupt background activity, process interrupts from your Mouse / KB, update your screen quickly (since they were higher priority) and go back to folding quickly enough that you didn't notice all that had to happen to use the idle CPU time. Folding (or even bitcoin mining) with GPUs is still at the DOS stage of development, meaning you'll have to make some decisions about how much degradation you're comfortable with and how much of the GPU you're willing to devote to FAH.

One possibility that seems workable is to fold with your CPU 24x7 and with the GPU only when idle (like a screensaver). That option closely maps to the Medium slider setting. The GPU fires up and folds while your sleeping or AFK.

You will not be happy trying to use your GPU for both gaming and folding (unless you have extra video devices). When browsing, screen lag might be a minor factor, depending on your GPU and several rather specific settings.