Yes, that was strange, the reason may be that they tested with a beta app of f@h, they got from NV directly.

Nvidia stellte kurz vor dem Ende der Testzeit eine Beta-Version des Folding@Home Programms zur Verfügung, das die neuen GeForce Grafikkarten unterstützt. Die Berechnungen finden dabei ausschließlich auf dem Grafikchip statt, der Prozessor wird nicht belastet und steht für andere Aufgaben zur Verfügung.

in short: they got a beta-version of f@h from NV to test the new geforces.

so, it is NOT the normal GPU2-client distributed by f@h itself. I dont know why NV should do this, because the results are not THAT good as one expected. maybe because the standard f@h client do not recognise the fermi properly.
There should be a lot of optimisation going on before we can see real world performance on folding.

Yes, that was strange, the reason may be that they tested with a beta app of f@h, they got from NV directly.

The story is even worse than I suspected. Special app from NV... Hm... Okay, let's try to find more reviews

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One of the best german computer-webpages have tested the cuda performance of GF100, too, but they couldn´t get the performance like Anandtech. Only 30% speedup in F@H and Badaboom compared to a GTX285. You can read the results (in german) here.

Folding@Home always needs to update their client to support new chips, so the new client is nothing fishy yet. I don't know where this 30% faster vs. 3 times faster comes from, though. It could be that Anand had a newer beta client or that they ran very different WUs. At F@H the different WU types correspond to different algorithms, so relative performance between cards could differ.

Edit: funny side note.. until a couple of months after the release of the HD4800 these guys were still just as fast as the 3800 series, despite going from 60 to 160 5D shaders. Because F@H wasn't quick enough to update their client to make use of the additional units.

Edit2: I took a look at the F@H benchmarks from Hartware.net. They actually tested 3 different WUs types / projects, so this is not the reason for the discrepancy. Judging the GTX470 performance it could be that it only uses 240 shaders (client not yet fully updated), but then it shouldn't get that hot & shouldn't consume as much power.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

I read couple of other review and all of them saying about "tens %" but not "times" advantage over GTX285 in F@H.

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Due to the sheer number of shaders it should be at least a factor of 2. I don't doubt that these guys are measuring such low numbers, but something is wrong here. Maybe we should ask Anand or read over at the F@H forums. They should be running up and down the walls because of this issue right now :p

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

im no expert on molecular dynamics but it runs well on stream processors. the gtx480 should be excellent because it has a cache that can act as a bandwidth cushion when you have overlapping gathers. fermi also has the ability to put register spills into cache. this can help performance A LOT. if you are spilling registers your performance is terrible. (i.e. 5870 performing as fast as a 8800GT). the new arch makes it easier to write compilers due to unified address space. this all translates to great performance.

You mean this should all translate into great performance ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002