Catalyst Update improve PPD

_k

I am calling you out mas0n and any of you guys with Radeon cards that are folding(who else does?). There is always talk of PPD increase in the when new Catalyst Control Center updates are pushed because of the larger shader counts that are present on the ATI cards versues their NVidia counter-parts. Mas0n said something about watching out around the first of the year because there is suppose to be an update that will greatly increase all ATI cards ppd. With all this talk and me not having an ATI card that can run a GPU client, I found out to late to get my 1900xt in on it, it makes me curious to see what kind of increases that you guys see when you update. The NVidia cards never see a very large increase if any, just CPU usage going down to 0.03%.

Let me know if anything interesting happens.

pragtastic

I'm folding on a 4670 and plan on updating drivers when I get home, I don't have any previous benchmarks to compare to though, unfortunately.

mas0n

These new drivers theoretically should not provide any increase to PPD. The new ATI drivers include CAL 1.3, but the GPU2 client still uses CAL 1.2.1

MHouston of foldingforum.org is part of the AMD development team for F@H and has recently stated that there will be a core released in the near future that will better optimize use of CAL 1.2.1 resulting in a slight increase to ATI productivity; this new core is supposedly in the final stages of testing. His team has just begun testing a core that uses CAL 1.3 and he has stated that early results show much increased production on ATI GPUs. However, any new core can take weeks or even months to be tested on all platforms and made ready for release so who knows when we'll see it.

It is my understanding that when we DO see a new core that is more productive for ATI cards there will not be an increase in PPD for ATI cards so much as a decrease in PPD for nvidia cards. All GPU2 PPD from both ATI and Nvidia cards are based on the performance of an ATI 3850. So if a new core increases productivity for ATI, the relative productivity of nvidia cards will fall. However, ATI cards that are faster than the 3850 should see an increase.