And so it goes on ........ it'll never change, they will always leapfrog each other at their respective cutting edges. I decided a while back to stay with NVidia, but frankly its just as real world effective a choice to go ATI.

Well, for ordinary video you are right ...

But in the BOINC world, at the moment, it is a little more complicated. I suspect in 2-3 years this will not be the case and sticking to one side or the other will be a lot of "who cares" ... but, for the moment, the MFGR is important depending on which projects you wish to run. If you want to run Milky Way you have no choice but ATI or to run it on the CPU. For most other projects it is Nvidia.

It is looking like The Lattice Project will be the next to release a GPU application though it is not clear from the announcements if it is going to target the Nvidia or ATI cards (most likely it is Nvidia).

But the debates will not end ... it is like the Ford v. Chevy debates of my youth ...

Well i don't think there is a choice really, if you look at MW the version which they are making and is official will be CUDA ( nvidia )
If you ask why we don't get an asnwer but i guess it has todo with money.
Anyway the milkyway application on ati is build by cluster physik who made it from the available source of the mw application.
Ofcourse can you see this the same as the KWSN applications build for seti they are accepted but officially not supported.
Sadly the whole boinc community is somehow not very nice towards the ati community and i guess its gonna stay that way for a long time, mr. anderson has allready stated that only cuda will be the main for boinc as well.
So maybe in the next 20 years we will see support for ati cards, but again i say maybe ..... in a far far away fairytale.
But hell i no longer care i bought 2 ati cards so if boinc is not going to support them thats their problem.
I don't want to be pushed towards what mr.anderson wants i want to choose myself >.<

ATI support is supposed to be coming "real soon now" ... I agree that the introduction of GPU processing has not been as I would have liked. And I think they have made major mistakes along the way. With Snow Leopard rapidly approaching they are going to have these same issues and questions on the Mac platform ... though they are also going to be bugged about OpenCL which SL will support natively.

OpenCL should support both cards though I wonder if there will be two execuibles for each platform, one for each card. I thumbed through the OpenCL site and could not find a clear answer to that simple question ... so, I wait to see ...

But, OpenCL will have almost the same issues as did CUDA and as does the ATI connection.

uBronan,

it's not about "the community not being nice". ATI support was planned for BOINC right after the 6.6.x code tree with its scheduler changes was debugged.. which takes a *little* longer than *some people* expected.

You're not seeing wide spread adaption of ATIs by projects because they're even harder to program than CUDA. CUDA is a modified C, something developers know and like (I don't, but that's a different topic ;). So they "only" have to care about somehow adapting their algorithm to run efficiently on GPUs. This alone is so hard that you don't see wide spread adaption of it.

Now there's ATI CAL. Here you have to somehow adapt your algorithm to run efficiently on GPUs and you have to do this in a language which is more like assembler than C. That's a nightmare if you need to debug or change it. I think I only ever wrote one assembler program, a small and simple one, just a few lines of code in C. But, boy, did we make a ton of stupid errors and it took quite a while to figure them out, even with an excellent debugger..

Some training helps, but really: you don't want to do this with complex apps. With MW we're lucky that the actual code, the hot loop, is relatively simple. That's why cluster was able to do this in his spare time.

Paul,

I didn't bother with OpnCL much yet, but I'm sure there'll be one app for all. The instructions therein go to the vid card driver, which does the low level work for you. Similar to DirectX and OpenGL. In practise there may be different apps because people have to work around different bugs in the drivers or because they may have to use completely different algorithms / data structures to get good performance from different GPUs.

MrS

---

Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Mixing video card brands in the same box only really works in Vista and Windows 7 atm. Don't even think of trying it in XP of any flavor. It won't be happy with two different display drivers fighting each other behind the scenes from what I've read.

This is not true. I run both an ATI4870 for MW and an Nvidia 8800GT running SETI/GPUGRID/AUQA all of this under 32bit Windows XP sp3

How did you do this. Please explain

How did you do this. Please explain

I started by reading around and found these:

http://tinyurl.com/czgvyr

http://tinyurl.com/dcekgu

I then just bought a 4870 and added it in. I made the following observations:

1. When I plugged in the ATI card since the free PCIe slot I had was lower on the bus it became the default video for the bios / boot. If I want to change that I would just have to swap the ATI position with the Nvidia.

2. Windows however still used my nvida card as the primary OS card. I did have to connect a second monitor (or a second input on the same monitor) to the ATI card and extend my desktop to it under windows to get the OS to load the driver. You would need to do extend the desktop as well even if you used a dummy VGA connector.

3. For MW I am using the catalyst 8.12 drivers as I was having issues with the 9.1 driver which were causing the WUs to error out after a while. I am also using the .19e version of the MW GPU app from zslip.com

Basically I have been crunching happily since April with this configuration.

Thx for quick response. I will give it a try after my holydays