Can I get BOINC to use an ATI, instead of NVIDIA GPU? I have a powerful ATI Radeon HD 4890, which is at least as powerful as some of top-of-the-range NVIDIA GPUs. But when I tell BOINC to use my GPU, it simply says: "no work is available, because your computer does not have NVIDIA GPU".

BOINC is just a framework for the individual projects, sort of like an API. BOINC provides support for ATi and nVidia chips. It is up to the projects to make the specialized applications required to take advantage of specialized hardware such as GPUs.

SETI@Home's nVidia application was written by nVidia for free. ATi declined to help SETI@Home in writing the code for the application, requiring the project Admins to have to learn how to program for the hardware, which can take years to fully understand and write efficient code.

In short, there is no ATi application for SETI@Home, so there is no way for you to use your ATi GPU to crunch for SETI officially. Unofficially, there is a group of programmers that have taken the task of writing an ATi application for SETI@Home that only works with AstroPulse type workunits, but the application is still in beta/alpha testing at the moment and may have bugs in it.

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Milkyway@home and Collatz@home are the only projects that currently run on ATI cards without 3rd party apps. BOth projects will heat your GPU a great deal. I run Collatz and have had to adjust my fan speed in the Catalyst Control Center. Milkyway will run your GPU harder than Collatz and you'll see a definite spike in GPU temps.

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