Is my PC capable of both Gaming & Folding @ Home simultaneously?

[TearGod]

It's been a long time since I've run Folding @ Home. Would like to run it again, but really wouldn't want it to impact my gaming experience seeing as that's pretty much all I do on my PC all the time. Would anyone be able to tell me by looking at my specs it would effect performance running it while gaming?

 

Games I play are: Call of Duty Warzone, Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, Overwatch, Red Dead Redemption 2, RuneScape 3.

[Fasauceome]

The default setting for folding is "on idle" which means it'll fold when you PC would normally go to sleep. It will use as much of your system resources as possible, so no, you can't really game and fold at the same time on any system, unless you're running a second GPU for folding.

[jctappel67]

I accidentally played Far Cry 5 for about 1.5 hours while folding, FPS was about 15% lower, but folding took a major hit during that time.

 

I'm folding on an RTX 2060, so a 2070 should be somewhat better equipped to handle that worklload, though your TPF will suffer significantly while you play.

[Nine Tailed Fox]

I wouldn't do it..

[Letgomyleghoe]

2 minutes ago, CircleTech said:

But the GPU folding oh boy! Is that a whole nother can of worms. Folding@home (in my experience) hasn't gotten resource allocation for GPU folding right yet, and probably never well. I would not try to GPU fold while gaming. 

Yeahhhh, I was loading up a game and left folding on “while I’m working” the game launched and a gpu wu at the same time and “an error has occurred” 

[minibois]

If you're not CPU folding, playing a game is possible. If you don't limit your game fps though, your PPD will take quite a bit hit. If you do limit the fps in game, the hit in PPD won't be as bad.

[Quackwich]

I wouldn't do it, no matter what system I'm running as it may affect your game play and/or your folding, unless I have a second GPU to fold with.

 

 

[Kisai]

15 hours ago, TearGod said:

It's been a long time since I've run Folding @ Home. Would like to run it again, but really wouldn't want it to impact my gaming experience seeing as that's pretty much all I do on my PC all the time. Would anyone be able to tell me by looking at my specs it would effect performance running it while gaming?

 

Games I play are: Call of Duty Warzone, Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, Overwatch, Red Dead Redemption 2, RuneScape 3.

 

 

The correct answer is "not at the same time" and more to the point, "explicitly turn it off when running a MMORPG", as you'll be harming yourself in the game. "on idle" still isn't free.

 

What typically happens with these types of math crunching programs is that it interprets "on idle" as any (x) seconds where there is no input. So with games, this may not be seen correctly as it will fire back up on a cut scene, or waiting in a game lobby, or any number of "apparently idle" situations, of which game controllers don't tend to reset idle timers.

 

I'd suggest, that if you are playing a game, explicitly tell the folding program to pause. Even if these programs run in the background, on idle on the lowest priority, it still spins up the CPU/GPU to the maximum performance level, which will result in the cooling fans running at an appropriate speed for that performance level.

 

Historically this question is the same as "can I run a web browser while the game is running?" type of question, because people might be streaming music or video, and that performance isn't free. The memory, cpu power and gpu power are still being used, and having Chrome or Discord loaded, can consume half the pc's performance depending on what activity is going on.