Sunday, January 20, 2008

How to fold@home with 8800 (or any other video card)

First I am sorry for putting this in a blogger, but it was the fastest way for me to post this.

Step 1. Find the drivers for your system, and download them
nVidia
ATI

Step 2. Start the installation so it will extract the files, and then close the installer

Step 3. Get values for graphics card and uninstall your current driver.
First find what graphics card you have, by right clicking "My computer" and going to "properties". clicking on hardware tab. Then on Device Manager, Display Adapter, and then double click on the video card, and click on the details tab, and write down the DEV, and VEN values. after they are written down it is a good time to uninstall the driver, so click on driver tab, and select uninstall.

Step 4. Make your video card look like an x1950 to Folding@Home
Go the the folder the files are extracted, and edit the file with devID's and video card names.

for nVidia users:C:\NVIDIA\Win2k\169.21\English\nv4_disp.inf

for ATI users:C:\ATI\SUPPORT\8-1_xp32_dd_57717\
Driver\Driver\XP_INF\57717.inf

inside of the files look for your DEV and VEN ID Numbers

ATI Users should look under the [ATI.Mfg.NTx86] section, (It is the section with all the names., and nVidia Users should look uner the "; Localizable Strings" section.

once you find your video card replace the string, to say "Radeon X1950 Series" instead of your video card.

Finally install your video drivers by going to the extracted directory and clicking setup.

Have fun Folding!

P.S. if you have a problem with a d3dx9...dll, just install direct x from microsoft's site

2 comments:

MadGoat said...

Has anyone tested this with a 8800? Speeds? Is it a viable option yet? And it would seem that the GPU client would need the ATI cat driver to boot.

Vijay Pande said...

This is in violation of the Folding@Home EULA (see http://folding.stanford.edu/English/License).

Such violations have in the past been met with zeroing of points. The NVIDIA do not work for folding, sending back false (but easily identifyable) results.