6.12 cats break the folding @ home on my machine at least - the gpu wasn't turning over work units well anyhow. It was supposed to be the oh gee whiz this can crank WU's like no tomorrow but in all honesty I don't think I got one WU out of it in a week. It shut itself off when gaming, and when it came back up it often had errors and had to be restarted and get a new WU. Turning it off manually prior to gaming didn't seem to help. It seems as if it's general functionality is limited by this, and the fact that it seems very sensitive to driver version make it almost unusable in my book.

I would assume since its the GPU processing the WU that it similar to folding with a 500-600mhz CPU, which generally only works well when folding timeless work units. just my 2 cents.

I'd say that in theory, folding is a task that could really benefit from parallelism (sp), which, in theory a gpu should have a pretty large lead on a cpu of similar clock speed - depending on the gpu and cpu being compared of course, but talking high end gpu to either K8 or Core on a clock for clock basis.

I think the problem is that getting the GPU to do something it really wasn't intended to do, and in all honesty, a bit of a first round go at it, is probably a big problem. But coding things so specifically that they require specific driver revisions can't help much either.

My 2 Hz on the subject is that the GPU folding needs a lot more work, and there's always serious risk in terms of security(not to mention HAL) when you ask certain parts to do things for which they were not at all designed to do. It could only be a matter of time until people start coding malware that can run off a video card, etc.

I'm going to file this under an interesting first round, but not something practical at this time.

The other big thing to note is that the GPU console is still getting Beta cores.

for those few who don't update their drivers muwahahaha