Folding Forum

I've been Folding At Home since 2011. My ranking this year varied between 2352 and 2360 until April. Now it is 2491. I had been folding on two desktops using the GPU only, but added the CPUs two weeks ago when WU's became scarce.. Both desktops have Intel I7 processors, one 4 cores the other 6. My ranking still declined. Both GPU are Radeon RX 560s. Are AMD GPUs more prone to not get WUs than Nvidea GPUs? If not what has changed? I have installed version 7.6.9


Date of last Work Unit 2020-05-04 00:45:28
Total score 272,602,868
Total WUs 29,893
Overall rank (if points are combined) 2,491 of 2,671,446
Active clients (within 50 days) 4
Active clients (within 7 days) 4

On the weekend of March 13, we got about 10 times as many volunteers returning Work Units as we had the month before. I went from the second most active in my team to 20th.

I have dropped about 25 positions in overall points. And this is all good, more science is good!

Walter: Huge thanks for sticking with us since 2011---a bunch of our papers likely include calculations run on your machines, for which we are immensely grateful!

As @JimboPalmer notes, we're seeing a lot of new donors now, and we're very excited about all of the additional science we can do. We hope that long-time folders like yourself will continue to stick with us, since we're able to bring onboard some extra resources now that will help us improve things for everyone---including AMD folders! Stay tuned for more great things to come.

~ John Chodera // MSKCC

Hi Walter, I understand your situation I have dropped a bit and am likely to lose my current top 200 spot soon, the sudden burst of new donors has not decreased the value of the work you have already although has impacted on your and many long term donors current rank. As your will know as a veteran folder points used to be a bit harder to earn with the hardware we had in 2011. I seem to remember that in 2009 there was a category of 'most powerful folder' in a single system of 20kppd (an enormous amount at the time) that I met with a double SMP and 4 x 9800gt gpu's in a single box. With the wind blowing the right way and my fingers crossed. In 2011 I had a gtx550ti that beat that entire system. Now single gpu's produce millions of ppd and this is good.
I encourage you to keep up the great work you have done, all new donors are "standing on the shoulders of giants", the people who have stuck with this project for years.

Talking about the Old Days, In "08" I was #1 on my Team & PCMECH was something like #65 in the world.
I had 6 Boxes running 12 Gpu's mostly 9800's & a couple of GTX275' s. Boxes were using Fedora 6_64
and each GPU ran in separate terminal windows had to jump through multiple hoops to fold at all.
with all of that I was lucky to get 800 to 900k PER MONTH.

Walter, there are "people" folding at rates of billions a month at the moment. Some of these are producing in a day what you've produced in your nine years of folding.

Your two RX560s produce in a good day maybe 250K?

A new volunteer running a single 2080ti will get ten times that per day and catch up to you 9-year score in 3½ months.

Your contribution is valuable nonetheless but don't expect that your relatively modest hardware will allow you to hold your position forever,

Before this CV-19 influx I was around #74 in the daily average production, now I'm down at #299.

Yeah, this COVID debacle attracted a lot of gamers with high end hardware

Newbie just wanting to say a huge THANK YOU to Walter and all the long-time folders! I’ve been folding for less than a month, and my little laptop can only handle four or five WUs a day so I will never be big in the points. And that’s okay. Fold on!

Just means some people are pulling more PPD than you. I'm relatively new, so I move up by about a thousand spots per day for now, but in the long term, there will be more people who can pull more PPD than I will be able to, and so it will slide. In the end, this is fine.

I am 2,500 out of 2.6 million. It isn't anyone new, no matter what hardware they have that are passing me this last month. My point is I was producing more points than the 150+ people who passed me before virus drew so many new members. At this ranking you are lucky to improve by 10 in a month and do not lose ranking drastically unless you stop folding. I have had some trouble getting WUs for my GPUs, but the forum has made it clear that has been the norm for the last month. Adding 8-10 cores of CPU (4Ghz) only adds a third of the points that the GPUs produced. I still lost ground. This leads me to conclude some GPU types have less problems getting WUs than others or are getting WUs worth more points. My question is can Nvidia chipset GPUs get WUs that AMD Radeon GPUs cannot?

I think there are some workunits that are restricted from some AMD gpus, but I fold NV and still saw my output drop to 1/3 of previous and even now only back to at best 75% of what was normal in February.

Walter wrote:...My question is can Nvidia chipset GPUs get WUs that AMD Radeon GPUs cannot?

To elaborate a bit more on what kiore said, some Projects are exclusive to Nvidia. Some are exclusive to AMD. Others can run on either. You also have some Projects exclusive to Linux, others exclusive to Windows and others can be run on both.

I don't know any AMD exclusive projects
I do know a lot of nVidia exclusive projects due to AMD GCN openCL bug in openmm and some of them are excluded from AMD because they just run really bad on AMD hardware.

Personally, if every single user raced past me and I end up at the very bottom, and that's after all my contributions since 2009, I'd be ecstatic because that means more science!

Thank you for letting know there are NV exclusive projects. I was trying to make sense of what was happening.

I chose my system to take into account power usage vs output. The GPUs are like having 2 65 watt bulbs on 24 hr/day. (The total inclucing the CPUs is around 225-250 Watts/hr if I fold with the CPUs) It is a drain on my solar panels. I could not find a comparable NV card with as low a power usage and as good a rating.