New Folding GPU3 Beta for Nvidia Cards

For the folders amongst you that are lucky enough to have a GTX400 series graphics card and are into folding, a new GPU3 Folding client is now available as an open beta. All you need is the 197.45 drivers and the new client, of which there are a variety of versions, so be sure to get the right one. Currently, some problems have been found with 8800 and 9800 series GPU’s, so best stay clear of this beta for now if you fold with any of those, but fixes are already being prepared.

Nvidia has also made a Blog post about the new client, which is available here.

The New Client is specifically tailored to Nvdia based GPU’s at the moment, and offers a significant boost to folding on Fermi based cards. ATI users will not see any benefit from the new client, however Stanford are still trying to improve GPU acceleration for ATI based cards but no time has been set as to when we’ll see a release. My guess is the lack of a CUDA equivalent is causing problems, since OpenCL is still early in development and lacks the maturity of CUDA.

If you’re not into Beta’s, then you might want to give this a miss for the time being, but we’ll let you know if there are any further developments and/or the client is officially released. Hit the source for more info and downloads.

We have a new GPU core (core 15) going into an open beta test for NVIDIA clients. This core requires a new client (see below) as well as the latest drivers (197.45). This core is the first run of the GPU3 technology, derived from the OpenMM project at Stanford (http://simtk.org/home/openmm). You can find more information in our GPU3 FAQ (see url below).