Folding Forum

I was wondering if it would be possible to create a gpu client that only used the idle part of the gpu (much like the smp client).

This would be great because I can play games and not only run the smp client, which I do, but the gpu client as well.

Thanks.

If the PG could get the GPU client to work like this, they would. Unfortunately, GPUs have never been designed to handle multi-tasking very well since normally they're only doing one thing at a time, i.e. showing the pretty graphics of the game you're playing. Compare that to a CPU, which has always had to carry out various OS-related tasks while running all of the foreground programs you run, and you should see why the CPU client works better with other tasks than the GPU client.

Not likely to happen any time soon. It would require chip-level HW changes in the GPU to support priority interrupts, driver changes, and OS changes.

The GPU client is considered a high performance client, like SMP. Neither are designed to run on "spare" background CPU cycles. It's counter-intuitive to the design goals, and the goals of the project.

I wouldn't say never, but let's try to get a good working GPU client first, and then they can try for other configurations.

Was sure there was a reason, and makes sense, thanks.