Folding Forum

I have noticed that you can get the highest PPD switching the F@H preference to Parkinsons and Cancer project.

Have you seen the same? pls post your results.

I haven't really paid much attention to it lately. At times certain preferences might help, but that also depends on the level of hardware you are running.

I have in the past used preferences to avoid certain work units that my older gear wouldn't finish on time. Now that I have a newer GPU I really don't usually set preferences, since I think they are all good causes.

Even if you do set a preference it is often just the luck of the assignment server and which particular projects you get.

My AMD Radeon 7900XTX strongly favors a particular series of parkinson WUs - it's the only project which gives even half decent performance for the wattage consumed (over 10M PPD at times with some of these WU - at 300-350+ watts consumed.)

Previously I didn't favor any particular cause - it didn't matter because my Vegas sucked at everything - they just sucked more at some projects; record I think was ~200k PPD at 200W... lolol So it basically didn't matter. But now I pick the cause where I can get the most work done in the least amount of time. Of course, I will still get terrible WUs from other causes that deliver only around 3M PPD for the same 300+ watts of power wasted.

I really wish something comprehensive could be done about AMD folding performance, I don't know what it would take, but probably an act of divine intervention at this stage...

Some are claiming that HIP will give a huge boost to AMD for folding and certain other things. Of course it's always soon.... when soon is nobody knows. TBH I didn't even look at any AMD stuff when GPU prices dropped a little last year and I grabbed one. The lack of driver updates and support alone scared me off. Being I don't game and purchased it simply for folding and daily compute use boost, the value for both and power efficiency seemed to land firmly on Nvidia.

And it does seem that some of the older AMD stuff really had huge variations with folding. During the peak of the COVID stuff there were people getting PPD not much greater than my iGPU at times with certain projects.


As for preferences, at times choosing one might help, other times it might not change much. But since we are always playing the odds of what projects get sent it's still sort of a gamble most of the time. Species and project assignments might dictate when the gamble is more likely to pay off, but it's still a gamble.

As I said in the previous response, I haven't played with preferences for a while. It seems my gear gets reasonable variation on the projects assigned to it. I think even the gross high vs low projects have been less than 300% variance, and that is the extreme outliers. Most of the time it's well within a 200% swing, and more often closer to 150% or so.