GeForce GTX 280 review

Example 3: Folding @home on the GeForce GPU

Obviously you guys read the news already, personally I'm pretty psyched about it myself. Last year I spoke with Mike Houston from Stanford University, he's a key figure behind the Folding @home project, in fact he's the one that convinced me to start Team Guru3D for Folding@home.

Back then I had concerns about the fact that a GPU client for GeForce Based graphics cards was still not a reality. NVIDIA's Point of view on this topic was simple; it's not a priority for us, they stated. When I asked Mike, why not run it through CUDA (as I figured CUDA would be the best solution to their problem) he claimed that lacking development access from NVIDIA was part of the problem.

The problem last year with CUDA was that it is a complete rewrite of lots of code that will only run on a single vendor. And at Stanford they figured, it's hard to be convinced to do this when things don't work with their code base. That and there was a performance differential with the G80 processors (GeForce 8800). Apparently NVIDIA did not open up the bottom layer of CUDA, which would allow Stanford to bypass the DX drivers.

Now, the good news then. Over the past 12 months a lot of progress has been made between the two parties involved. And right now there is a Beta Folding client in development that is already working on the GTX series 200 processors. The good thing is, it's CUDA based .. meaning that all CUDA ready GPU's will run and can start folding as well (GeForce series 8 and newer).

Even better news: The first numbers we have seen are downright astonishing. If we stick to the GeForce GTX 280 for a minute, you can expect a 3 fold better folding performance over for example the Radeon HD 3870, which can compute really well already.

The new GeForce will compute slightly more than 500 mol/day, which is three times more than the 170 mol/day of the Radeon HD 3870. To get you an even better perspective ... that's five times more than the 100 mol/day of the PlayStation 3! And that thing can crunch data man.

Once the client is out, please join team Guru3D and let's fold away some nasty stuff. The good thing, you won't even notice that's running. Our folding @home info can be found here:

http://www.guru3d.com/category/folding/

Our team number is 69411 and if you decide to purchase the GeForce GTX 280/260 product, guys, promise me you'll use it to fold for us. Of course I recommend all GeForce 8800/9800 owners to give this a try as well.

By making this move my dear friends, there are now 70 Million GPUs available to compute the biggest mysteries in deceases and illnesses. Again, let's make Team Guru3D the biggest one available guys, join our team - 69411.

We have early access to the application. Here you can see the new GPU client activated and crunching data on the GTX 280. And it's fast !