Will an Insaneally accelerated graphics card make the WU processing faster ??

Im planning to get the 9550 Radeon
Wich has 258megs of video memory.

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> Will an Insaneally accelerated graphics card make the WU processing faster ??
>
> Im planning to get the 9550 Radeon
> Wich has 258megs of video memory.
>

The boinc developers have tried this. AGP cards aren't really useful for this,
because the data transfer from the card to main ram is too slow.
(You spend more time waiting for results, than it would take to do the calculations on the CPU)

PCI express should be a better option. It's faster.
The 6xxx nvidia cards might be the way to go.

I haven't tried this, because I don't have the needed hardware -- yet :o)

Regards Hans

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But the radeon doesnt have onboard memory, it has it on the card itself.

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For number crunching, seti@home uses your CPU exclusively. There will be no difference between a TNT2 and the latest Radeon. Now if you look at the graphics a lot, the GPU could make SOME difference. The graphics use openGL so they can be rendered on your graphics card however as far as I know they are not very demanding and any graphics card less than 4 years old would give you about the same results.

Hans was talking about an effort by the devs to actually use your GPU instead of (or in addition to) your CPU to do the scientific calculations for the project. Last I heard they were "looking" at it but that was a while ago and I guess they decided it wouldn't work.

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Looking at the cpdn graphic in a window causes crunching to drop from 98% cpu load to oscillating between 80 and 90, don't know if the full screensaver would be worse. So if you were to run the graphics alot wu's would be slowed a bit.

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Personally i get bored of watchin the graphics but when i do want a quik look its brief....I mean mayb if u wanted to show ur pc doing it like if uve got a "seti farm" it wuld look pretty but u might aswell just get them "farming" faster than look at the prettys :P....

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A seti wu justed started so i tried the same test. The crunching seems the same when the graphic is running, not what I expected.

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Hmmmm thats intruiging but what cpu, ram and gfx u got?

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> A seti wu justed started so i tried the same test. The crunching seems the
> same when the graphic is running, not what I expected.

Also, which time are you going by? If you are looking at the "CPU time" column in BOINC, you won't see a difference no matter what. That only records the time spent on number crunching. Graphics are not included. You need to look at "wall clock" time to make an accurate comparison.

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Hi,

Try this, go to the task manager, click on the CPU column title and the Setiathome task appears at the top.
Right click on it and set the priority to normal instead of low.
This sets the level of CPU time it will use for processing the data.
This has to be done for each work unit as it is started though, I haven't found a way of setting it automatcally yet.
Doing this does come with a price though, if you are using your PC for anything else, it will or can lag a little.
I wouldn't set the priority any higher though, starts to get hard to do anything else.

I am using SetiSpy++ to monitor performance, it normally updates at the write to disk speed in your account settings. I set mine to update @30sec.

I noticed a WU time decrease of about an hour, approx 4hrs to 3hrs/WU.

Regards,

SteveH.

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That kind of performance increase is very atypical. Increasing the priority level of the Seti@Home application in Windows will only give you a performance boost if your system has competing processes going on that are fighting for CPU time. (You might want to scan your system for sypwear!) I can surf the web, check and write email and run other simple tasks without seeing a significant impact in WU completion times from low priority vs. medium. Most other Windows users find the same results. If it works for you, however, go with it. Resetting the priority for each WU gets pretty old though!

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At night, I set it at "above normal" or "high". But when I'm using the PC I simply leave it at "low".

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We have code examples of GPU code for doing part of a WU process on SourceForge for the setiboinc project.

If there is some clever GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) programmer out there who wants to join the project s/he could help us write that part.

Then many systems would become dual "CPU" systems (or possibly triple with an HT Intel).

The problem is getting data from regular RAM and into GPU RAM and back again...
the only probable practical solution (or at least the fastest) would be to re-write most of the WU processing code in GPU programming language. This way the data could stay in GPU RAM and not get sent up/down again.

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Does anyone know how it would speed things up(at least for home users)?
OK there are for sure lotsa ppl. with high end gfx for example >= radeon 9800pro

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I might have the wrong idea but are you saying use the gfx card to run seti operations too? surely this would mean that running a game at the same time would doubly be affected?

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> I might have the wrong idea but are you saying use the gfx card to run seti
> operations too? surely this would mean that running a game at the same time
> would doubly be affected?
>

There would be an option of not using it. The programmers here think things through well before programming anything and wasting their time - or at least thats the impression I get.

>The problem is getting data from regular RAM and into GPU RAM and back >again...
>the only probable practical solution (or at least the fastest) would be to re->write most of the WU processing code in GPU programming language. This way >the data could stay in GPU RAM and not get sent up/down again.

Benher, would it be possible to use the GPU to run one WU while the CPU ran a different WU? Or would this be too much work for the system and negate the speed increase? Perhaps a smaller WU for graphics cards only?

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"Death Warmed Up" - Just one of the interesting dishes in my new cookbook.

> I might have the wrong idea but are you saying use the gfx card to run seti
> operations too? surely this would mean that running a game at the same time
> would doubly be affected?

You would not be able to run one at all ... the data in the Graphics Memory is written to the screen. That is the feature that intrigues me ... what would the display look like while calculating ...

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> > A seti wu justed started so i tried the same test. The crunching seems
> the
> > same when the graphic is running, not what I expected.
>
> Also, which time are you going by? If you are looking at the "CPU time"
> column in BOINC, you won't see a difference no matter what. That only records
> the time spent on number crunching. Graphics are not included. You need to
> look at "wall clock" time to make an accurate comparison.
>
I was looking at the processes cpu load list in task manager, should have made that clear. Runnning on a P4 2.6 and 9800Pro graphics with latest drivers etc. I don't know if its by design but it looks like the devs have done a good job off loading the graphics processing to the gpu. I since noticed if you use the s or u views for the cpdn graphic it behaves more like seti, but they are very dull views. I vote that graphacis should use pixel shader effects :)

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> You would not be able to run one at all ... the data in the Graphics Memory is
> written to the screen. That is the feature that intrigues me ... what would
> the display look like while calculating ...
>
Actually, the only portion of graphics memory written to the screen is the framebuffer. If data is on the framebuffer, it is sent through the card's DAC to turn it into analog data for use by your CRT (or sent out the DVI port without the DAC). The framebuffer itself is only a handful of MB in size. Running at 1600x1200 with 32-bit color requires a framebuffer just a hair over 7MB. The rest of the VRAM holds data used to render the scene (textures, level data, back buffers, depth buffers, etc).

SETI would likely use the GPU to do it's calculations (by using pixel and vertex shaders), and have it save the results of "shading" to a different area of VRAM. I can almost 100% garuntee that it will slow down games if being used at the same time, but other than that the two should be able to cooperate with each other.

Puffy

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>
> SETI would likely use the GPU to do it's calculations (by using pixel and
> vertex shaders), and have it save the results of "shading" to a different area
> of VRAM. I can almost 100% garuntee that it will slow down games if being used
> at the same time, but other than that the two should be able to cooperate with
> each other.
>
It sure would have an effect on the games I play, those 8 pixel shaders get well used here. Although many seem to run ok beside BOINC a cpdn and predictor wu in memory take up 110 MB ram so I generally quit Boinc before doing battle.

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