Folding Forum

Hello. In my AMD global settings would it be better if I switch my GPU workload from 'Graphics' to 'Compute'. Many thanks.

Specs:
RX 580
Adrenalin 18.2.1

FAH uses pure compute resources. Your real answer depends on the magnitude of graphics resources needed by other concurrently running programs.

Do you run FAH and move your mouse concurrently? ... or watch a video? ... or attempt to play a high-performance game?

Graphic resources are not used by Folding.

Moving your mouse can be handled quite nicely without a GPU and, in fact, your CPU will probably respond more quickly than a slow[?] GPU that's heavily loaded.

Before the AMD global settings were invented, many folks decided they would optimize their FAH Compute performance by going into each applications, finding some kind of setting that said something like "disable high performance video" which would force your system to use the CPU to rasterize video.

As with other "optimize" settings, the setting doesn't matter if you aren't using a mixture of resources. For example, if you're watching a video, computing may be delayed slightly vs. the video may experience minor pauses. While you're sleeping, compute performance will not change.

For folks with a slow GPU (probably not including you) -- and without such a setting, it's possible that FAH can demand enough shader performance that even the OS's use of graphics gets delayed noticeably. It's commonly called "screen lag" when the mouse pointer doesn't respond quickly enough. For the slowest NVidia GPUs, there's no suitable fix for this except to pause folding while you're using the computer. Putting that function in FAH was not an ideal solution.

(FAH has an "idle" setting which is coordinated with whenever the OS would notify a screensaver to come on but that's not an ideal solution. Putting that function in FAH was not an ideal solution. It really belongs in the drivers. It's good that Crimson now provides this type of option.)