How much time does our older vid cards really have left?

[Drsignguy]

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=23759


After doing some reading in the F@H forums and searching for reasons why the gpu server is down I came upon this little thread. Now I have heard of some rumors about the older cards being phased out as well as the ps3 deal but this kind of thing puts a damper on our folding production.

 

[Assimilator1]

Yea PS3 stopped Nov last year IIRC, & my 48x0 cards sometime before that .

I've got 260 c216 but I don't use it for DC (rig's mostly off anyway).
Keeping my fingers crossed for ya!

 

[Drsignguy]

Bummer that my 3 rigs running, 2 of which have two 260/216 in them and are not getting any work. From what I have read, sounds like Tuesday before they get the server up and running again. In the meantime, they lay idol until something comes down the pipe.

 

[Drsignguy]

Well so far so good, cards back to work. But once they Phase out the 260's, that would be most my farm. Looks like I am going to have to upgrade to some Fermi cards to keep up. Not a bad thing just an expensive one buy two buy three buy four buy five buy six etc....

 

[Assimilator1]

Any word on when they'll be phased out?

 

[Drsignguy]

Not that I know of. I'm sure they will pre warn us, that is if they haven't already by the work units that are sporadic lately. Seems in the last couple of months, either the server is down or lack of work. Sure sign of a slow painful death. Either way, gives me an excuse to start upgrading my farm.....again. ��

 

[Assimilator1]

Lol

 

[networkman]

The folks over at the Einstein@Home project decided to phase out support for the ATI Radeon 3xxx series cards, which effectively eliminated my home rig for that project. That was back around fall of 2012 I think (before we sold our house). So my home rig (Athlon 64 x2 something or other) with its ATI 3750 is currently sitting idle.

 

[totalnoob]

Why on earth are the phasing out ANY cards? This doesn't make any sense to me. Why wouldn't they allow all generations to fold? I understand that older-gen cards aren't as efficient as new ones, but they still fold fine, and every point contributed helps the science.

 

[sangyup81]

Why on earth are the phasing out ANY cards? This doesn't make any sense to me. Why wouldn't they allow all generations to fold? I understand that older-gen cards aren't as efficient as new ones, but they still fold fine, and every point contributed helps the science.

There are programming issues since they are moving to OpenCL. Hopefully there won't be any reason to eliminate any OpenCL capable cards

 

[networkman]

That's what we were told with the Einstein@Home project - that it was an issue of programming. Not saying I agree with it, but that's what they said.

Next week I'll be ordering a replacement CPU (to add 2 more cores, cache & speed). Then I'll see about a better video card.

 

[Assimilator1]

Same reason for F@H & the 48xx series card as I recall .

 

[sangyup81]

Same reason for F@H & the 48xx series card as I recall .

HD 47xx and 48xx should be Open CL compatible so I don't know why they have to discontinue support of those cards =T

 

[Assimilator1]

IIRC, it was because the support for Open CL wasn't complete.
From here http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-GPU3common#ntoc7 :-

What GPUs are supported?

For ATI

ATI Radeon™ HD 6990

•5xxx/6xxx/7xxx ATI Video Card, or newer
•ATI Driver v12.8 driver or newer
•Windows operating system, XP or newer

Note that only 5xxx GPUs and newer are supported due to ATI dropping support for the Brook programming language. They have since moved to OpenCL, which is not supported on 3xxx-class GPUs, and the 4xxx series is not supported enough for efficient FAH calculations. See this blog post for more information.