Folding@home

Creator: Stanford University

Folding@home is possibly the most successful GPGPU application at the moment, with ATI pioneering GPU-based folding years ago with its Radeon X1000 range of GPUs. Since then, folding has spread to the point where Nvidia has supported folding on all GPUs since its GeForce 8-series.

Folding is a client-based distributed computing application that simulates protein folding to aid our understanding of complex diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow Disease (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. To add some interest to the furthering of scientific and medical research doesn't hold any interest for you, Stanford also has team- and user-based leaderboards, so folding is also a competition.

To fold on your GPU, visit the High Performance Client page and download the latest version. The client downloads work units (aka 'projects') from Stanford, and each work unit is worth a certain amount of points.

You can monitor your folding progress via the FahMon tool, which will calculate how quickly your card can get through the current work unit and extrapolates a points per day (ppd) figure. You can join the Custom PC and bit-tech Folding team (currently ranked fifth in the world) by using the team number 35947. Your contribution is valued.


Nvidia is keen to push folding performance, as the company is pushing the GPGPU capabilities of its cards and it runs folding via CUDA. As such, Nvidia cards tend to have roughly double the performance of ATI cards. The Radeon HD 4770's performance slightly more than four percent lower than the Radeon HD 4850's, which would equate to a perfect map of theoretical throughput, but this could be down to the differing work units we were given for each card. It scored just shy of 2,300 points per day, while the 4850 was closer to 2,600 ppd.

It's no surprise to see the GeForce 9800 GT deliver much higher performance - we saw more like 4,000 ppd from that card, while the GeForce GTS 250 delivered over 5,500 ppd. The interesting choice for folders is the GeForce 9600 GSO though, as it delivers a higher ppd than the GeForce 9800 GT, yet costs around £15 less than it.


The Radeon HD 4770's power consumption under a Folding workload is pretty impressive - the 40nm process technology is doing its job here - with the only card using less power being the Radeon HD 4830. The 4850, by comparison, uses around 30W more power while the 9800 GT uses 20W more on average. It's no surprise to see the GeForce GTS 250 using more power than any other card tested here today, but then it is deliver more than twice the ppd of the closest Radeon so its power efficiency is still very good in that respect.