Folding Forum

bruce wrote:4) FAH is guilty of points inflation and it changes your expectations. I have no specific knowledge about your GPU, but maybe its average production should be lower than your expectations I'm sure you only want the highest numbers you've ever seen, even if they happened to be higher than they should be.

mgetz wrote:I was under the impression based on the FAQ that all projects were run on a standard benchmarking setup and points were determined from that. Is the point allocation method changing?

bruce wrote:The standard benchmarking setup made a lot of sense as long as most WUs were in a range where GPU performance was somewhat linear but every time a new generation of GPUs comes out, the GPU nonlinearities get worse.

mgetz wrote:To me that speaks to a WU that should either: Not be a candidate for GPU, was benchmarked wrong, or has an unanticipated issue in the WUs themselves similar to what happened with 13424. My guess is that the former two options are likely the case based on the responses in this thread.

ajm wrote:It is not as straightforward: ... they are rather good for a 1050ti: https://folding.lar.systems/folding_dat ... 50_ti_2138

(...) Regarding the comments the folding forum:

it's an uphill battle sometimes to get across to people that are used to doing something a certain way, or have expert level insight compared to the average user, and you're suggesting a different more accessible way.

The interface tries to make it clear showing dynamic change, but may not be clear if the person critiquing it does not use it and only sees a static image, not seeing it's very upfront about being variable data and that the performance averages are constantly changing on the DB site as well to help convey the concerns they are voicing.

Total PPD is estimated (labeled as such) and constantly changing no claims otherwise.

Average PPD is labeled as being work unit and GPU combination specific and the number of samples used to create that average based on the PPD swings as reported by different users clients, sampled at random to get peaks and valleys as reported from the F@H service. It's based on how the F@H reports PPD in real-time, as that's what average users are looking at.

This is a tool intended to provide an indication to folders that don't understand PPD is not constant and does wildly vary by project WU during individual folds and overall from start to finish of processing.

The addition of charting is to demonstrate to the new / average folder that PPD is not consistent at all and that the wave form seen is the folds generally synced with the TPF (time per fold) / checkpoints that the default client does not report transparently as an educational tool for users that might not dig in to or understand logs. The types of users confused when they can't get their PPD up to the value someone told them their hardware is capable of and flood forums with the same posts over how to get there.

Charts when viewed near the end of completion of the work unit show these users how PPD / WU Points were reported at the start, throughout processing and near the end, which is to demonstrate that it always starts high, levels out in to a fluctuating pattern, and PPD / points over the duration of the WU trend down the majority of the time as is seen in logs, but is presented in a way for an average user to view at a glance, in context to their GPU and the project/WU.

Ultimately if you're a F@H power user, you might mine all your own log data, have all this figured out, like calculating performance in context to your personal experience and specific hardware etc. you probably find the stock web client useless, use advanced client with log parsing and have no use for this extension or the related GPU database.

For people without that expertise or the time, this provides baseline information at a glance as an education tool and general indicator, charts changes in PPD performance as reported by the folding service in real-time to teach about impacts to performance tweaking GPU settings or using your system in different ways (watching videos, playing games etc.) and of tracks and provides aggregate averages of different hardware / project information to further demonstrate the differences.

The data in the extension is also just skin deep, and for those interested in looking deeper at GPU PPD average trends etc. the database site shows the average changes over time etc. as a further education tool as F@H cores / projects change.

End of the day, no one is forcing anyone to use it, it may not be for everyone and it's up to the user if it's of value to them.