It seems we were wrong when we announced in our recent news that the Radeon HD6000 would need a new client and core in order to fold.Though we were wrong about the current client being incapable of folding with the cards, we were right that the performance would not be of the first order.
This has been confirmed by two users on the official forum, Tobit and mdk777. The current client (6.23) is perfectly capable of folding with AMD's new cards if one simply starts it up with the -forcegpu ati_r700 flag, just as one would with a Radeon HD5000.
Unfortunately, the performance figures are disappointing; the current core is unable to efficiently take advantage of these chips' additional calculation units.
mdk777 got 3,153 PPD (p5733) on his non-overclocked HD6850. With the fan speed manually set at 70%, he was able to keep the GPU at 50°C. The difference in power consumption between the card idling and folding was 115W.
For his part, Tobit experimented on a HD6870. He received 3,618 PPD, but unfortunately didn't provide any information on the operating temperature or power consumption of the card.
By way of comparison, we invite you to read (or re-read) Radeon HD5770 test.
Meanwhile, we'll just have to wait for the Radeon HD6900's release at the end of November, and the new OpenCL core, and hope to see some performance increase from the red side of the force.
Source: Official Forum
KaySL
On: 11/03/10
