Ati 4870

[vaughan]

OK, I had a mix of ABC and Spinhenge tasks running. BOINC decided to use 4 cores for the ABC and Spinhenge tasks and gave the GPU 4 tasks. I tried suspending the CPU tasks and BOINC then gave the GPU tasks 8 instances 0.5 CPU each it said. In this scenario the mouse was very laggy.

In both situations described the GPU went to sleep after a period of time and the tasks then took hours to run (one was 7 hours!). I don't know how long this time period was / is because I don't check that box very often, when I do its usually by Logmein.

[Nflight]

New developing parameters in ongoing conversions to new stuff usually takes some getting used to. It would be great if it all worked like a clock, but we know better after all these years of frustration. BOINC took along time to get it right, rewrites upon rewrites - sometimes not always good rewrites. This GPU thing is the way everyone is looking to promote as a faster more reliable avenue but, it just is not a set in stone, no matter what platform your using, type of operating system quite yet.

Play time is not quite here for the majority of us who like to plug and play. We need to tinker and rethink how to approach this new GPU direction; ATI or Nvidia.

I feel confident the masterminded individuals who have brought us this far in real world crunching will solve these issues, its just how much time is the cause for urgency till the bottom falls out in energy costs and falling employment leaves many crunchers unable to participate...

[Brucifer]

As I'm leveraged (using wall street lingo) into the nvida world, I'm just gonna sit and watch the ATI world get itself straightened out a bit before I jump in to it. However I am a truly hardcore believer in the benefits of gpu's in the crunching world.