On a whim I picked up a second hand X1950 Pro from a friend who upgraded to an 8800 GT. I took it home and threw it in my HTPC to see if it could do a better job at accelerating H.264 video and the like than the onboard nVidia 6150 graphics chipset. It then occurred to me that I could be using it for FAH. I threw Windows on it and had a go.

Test Setup:
AMD X2 3800+ "Energy Efficient" 35 W
Asus M2NPV-VM
1 x 1 GiB generic PC2-4200
250 W mATX PSU, 14 A on 12 V rail
HIS X1950 Pro 256 MiB GDDR3
GPU client 6.00 beta 1/Linux SMP client 6.00 beta 1

This rig usually runs Ubuntu Server 6.06.1 LTS for x86-64. It gets a hair less than 900 PPD so that's the number to beat.

My testing revealed that with a fresh install of XP Pro it gets about 550 PPD on 2D clocks. I forgot about the whole 2D/3D clocks thing until it was 50% done with the WU. ATiTool made it crash, as the release notes promised, so I installed CCC and raised the clocks to their 3D-levels. I then got 630 PPD. That's not too shabby, but I'll be going back to Linux SMP since I get a third more PPD and it uses two thirds less power.

EDIT: I would love to continue crunching with it but SMP gives me better points and I'm just a big old points whore. They really need to revamp the GPU work unit points. They say it does about 40x the amount of work as a single CPU client in the same time period. I'll pull a number out of my ass and say that the SMP client gives 4x the performance of a single CPU client. If they doubled the points for the GPU work units they'd be getting a net gain of 10 times the work done by me in the same time period. I'd get better PPD and they'd get more work done.

But alas, they probably won't change anything until they rework the GPU FAH system. I suspect that they're working on a more generic GPU FAH solution and they won't fiddle with the current iteration much any more The new one will probably try to be more hardware/driver agnostic since the current only works with X1k cards and even then it only works well with X19xx cards. It's already a generation behind the cutting edge.

When testing this card I'm even more impressed with the integrated 6150 graphics than usual. I tested it by playing an episode of Heroes encoded from an HD-DVD into a 720p .mkv with H.264 graphics and AAC sound with VLC on Windows XP. With the nVidia 6150 onboard graphics over DVI I saw CPU usage between 10 and 30%, balanced nicely across both proc cores. With the big fancy graphics card consuming ten times the power I saw CPU usage between 10 and 25% with the same balancing.

nVidia claims nothing about H.264 acceleration on its product web page and only mentions hardware MPEG 2 decoding, the reason why I bought it. ATi claims that the X1950 Pro performs hardware acceleration of the same. I suspect nVidia is being modest about its product.

What's that 2/3-D malarkey you were spouting?

For the purpose of keeping cooler at idle, the card switches between stock clockspeeds on the core and RAM and underclocked values. It's not too far off from AMD's Cool'n'Quiet and Intel's SpeedStep. When you go into a 3D app it detects it and raises the clockspeeds. With FAH since it never enters into actual 3D display it stays at 2D clocks unless you manually change them.

Does that make sense?

Are they ever going to support nvidia's cards? And are nvidia ever going to release drivers to them? I got 2 8800gts laying idle here doing nth half of the time...

Perhaps in the future they will. Mum's the word for now. In my humble opinion I think that they will support next-gen ATi cards before they support any nVidia card since ATi's stream processor architecture is more conducive to what they're trying to do. On the flip side nVidia is putting effort into general processing on GPU (GPGPU). We'll see how it pans out.

Since BTI was wondering yesterday about folding on the AGP version of the x1950
~11-12 minute frames
Fahmon puts it @ ~424 PPD

Now talk to me more about setting it up for the 3D clock speeds so I can crank more PPD out of this.

Get ATI Tool and overclock your card.

That's about it.

Works for most NVidia cards too.

As mentioned above ATiTool crashes with X1950s when you attempt to set a clockspeed. It can be used, however, to manually control the fan speed. I set mine at 100% during testing.

Use the Catalyst Control Center as I did to change the clocks.

Yeah, I probably should have read your post thoroughly...

My bad.

Thanks Billy, that did make sense.

sorry if this is a bit of topic but why use an ATI tool to overclock a NVidia card?

Cause there is no NVIDIATool.

Becasue it's good at its job for both manufacturers. There are dedicated nVidia tools such as Coolbits.

That's it from me for a while, guys. I'm off for a week skiing in Aspen Colorado with my sister's ski club. Wish me luck.

I have an NVidia GeForce 7600 GS, which is well-known to be easily overclockable. ATI Tool is a good utility for overclocking, stress testing, and monitoring your graphics card. It allows for hot key presets too, so I leave my gpu underclocked most of the time, and kick it up with a quick keystroke if I want to play a game.