ATI Catalyst 8.3 Drivers To Support F@H on GPU's
Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 2:32 pm
Just got sent an interesting slide from an anonymous source that has some details in it about F@H and ATi's upcoming CATALYST 8.3 drivers.
The same source says that ATI CATALYST 8.3 drivers fully support F@H with a beta client and that once the client comes out that the video cards will be ready to start cranking away on the work units. A huge performance increase is said to be had, but no numbers have been mentioned. Stanford has talked about GPU Clients for some time now and just recently made this comment about GPU folding on Feb 20th:
- ATI Marketing Presentation Slide
- ati_gpu_update08.jpg (58.47 KiB) Viewed 5955 times
Looks like GPU Folding is about to get a big kick in the ass, which will increase output! Guess we will have to wait till later this month or early April for the new Stanford Client. CATALYST 8.3 drivers are due out next month and are said to be F@H ready.We're pretty happy with the results of the QA from our new GPU core and we are working with ATI to do some more extensive QA. If that goes well, the next step is a closed beta, and then an open beta (i.e. downloads on our web site).
It's taken a while to get to this point due to many fixes and changes under the hood. Some of these changes have to do with new ATI development tools for using GPUs (these changes will help the reliability of the code as well as solve a lot of issues donor side, such as problems with drivers) as well as new science we've put into the GPU code, to bring it up to date with what we now do on the PS3 (in fact, some features of the GPU code are not present in the latest 1.3.1 PS3 version, but we hope they will be included in a future version).
I'll keep everyone posted here as we go along. It's hard to tell how long this current QA stage will take (and a lot of it depends on whether any major bugs surface), but we're happy to see this baby go out the door, at least with its first small steps.
