ATI releases new Folding@home driver

Posted at: 9:38am 17th April 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Officially supports Radeon HD 2000 and 3000-series GPUs in Stanford’s new GPU folding client

Many hardcore folders have been waiting for the day when DirectX 10 GPUs became capable of folding, and both Stanford and AMD have now heard your cries. Those of you who regularly check out our Folding forum will know that Stanford released a BETA of the new GPU client this time last week, but ATI has now added official support with its latest Catalyst 8.4 driver.

Owners of Radeon HD 2400 GPUs and higher, or Radeon HD 3400 GPUs and higher, can download the folding client from here and the new driver from here. However, ATI notes that there are still some issues with the client. It doesn’t support CrossFire multi-GPU configurations yet, and ATI says that ‘crashes can occur when running the new beta GPU Folding@Home client concurrently with 3D applications or playing back video content.’

Tests of the client on Stanford’s forums also suggest that the new GPU client doesn’t use all of the GPU, and is CPU limited to a certain extent. A machine with a Radeon HD 2900XT and a Core 2 Q6600 at stock speed produced 1,310 points a day, but this increased to 2,100 points a day when the CPU was overclocked to 3.8GHz.

As well as official support for the new GPU folding client, Catalyst 8.4 also contains some other fixes. These include adding the ability to enable anti-aliasing via the Catalyst Control Center when playing games using the Unreal Engine 3, and you can now also max out the settings in Company of Heroes without your machine exiting to the Desktop. The driver also fixes issues in Crysis after setting the 3D settings to Optimal quality in the Catalyst Control Center.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project that simulates how proteins fold for the purposes of medical research. By getting thousands of people to donate their spare CPU cycles to the project, Stanford university hopes to help find cures for Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. You can help the project by downloading the client, and joining Custom PC’s world-leading folding team by using the id 35947.