Folding Forum

I am upgrading the GPU in both my PCs. Alongside an i7 6700K, I am upgrading a GTX 580 to a GTX 1060. No problem on that system (it is currently temporarily folding on a 980 Ti that I will be shipping out of the country at the weekend)

The other system is touching on unknown territory for me. The APU is an A8-3870K. Barely worth folding on for 25K ppd and the electric cost. I have folded with a GT 730 in that system, but again, low ppd. I also transcode videos on that system, and the video converter can make use of an AMD card to accelerate both the decoding and encoding. I just bought a Radeon RX 570 to do that. It was about 25% cheaper than the GTX 1060, but on paper can perform about one third more GFLOPS.

My questions.

1) Should I uninstall the NVidia drivers before removing the GT 730 and installing the AMD card? Or will Windows 10 recognise that it needs a different driver and automatically know not to load the drivers?
2) I know AMD cards didn't used to be very good for folding. Has that changed? When I am not transcoding, is there much point to folding on the AMD card, or will it just eat electricity without generating much work?

Also, will the existing opencl.dll be usable on the AMD card, or will I need a different file from AMD, if I understand correctly that it is no longer bundled with the drivers?

While I don't own a modern AMD card, few here on the forum do, I would expect the RX 570 to fold very similar to a GTX 1060 3GB; which should net you around 300k PPD.
I could be totally wrong about it, but it's around what I'd expect it to do.

Opencl.dll as interface is common for both AMD or Nvidia and each driver then brings its own opencl runtime implementation. Uninstall nvidia driver if it gets an AMD only system now but it should not be necessary.

Before removing any GPU, activate the FINISH function in the client so the client stops the next time a WU is completed without downloading a new one. Shut down your system and remove the GPU. Presuming that the new GPU''s drivers won't be on the system, FAH will start up without detecting the new GPU. Go to the GPU chip manufacturer's website and install the appropriate drivers. Although it's probably not necessary, I always reboot here.

I expect that the restarted FAHClient will detect the new hardware and proceed to download a WU that runs on the new hardware. If that doesn't happen, reinstall FAHClient.

Thanks everyone.