Folding and Gaming at the Same Time. For Real.

Ommidiam · February 10, 2019

So about a week ago I was checking in on my folding stats and I had an idea. If I can use two cards to fold and tell the client which cards it should use... Then I can also tell the Nvidia driver which card to use and which to ignore. I made a video showing exactly how to do this. It works perfectly. I think that the only two requirements that must be met would definitely be a quad core cpu or better. As most anyone that folds with an Nvidia card knows, team green will eat up one whole cpu core per gpu used. The other concern is definitely heat (and power).

Short answer yes it works. Under the Geforce driver options for whatever game you are going to play you select one of the cards you would like to use. In my case I selected the Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming for Witcher 3. Now in the Folding@home Client I set up the Gigabyte GTX 970 as the primary card. No cpu folding.

So while the 970 starts to fold at 100% the GTX1080 hits 98-99% usage when Witcher 3 loads.

The 1080 did in fact downclock to 1800Mhz down from 2000Mhz because it hit almost 80c

Witcher 3 ran really well in the 80fps range although I do think that in a large city or battle that number would fall.

Anyways I thought it would be a fun video and uploaded It to my youtube channel. I hope its okay that I post it. I'm not trying to advertise my channel.

I feel it is an important bit of info for anyone that is interested in Folding@home and asks the question "Can I game and Fold at the same time" Answer -YES!

If the video attached is not allowed I won't be upset if it is removed.

RollinLower · February 10, 2019

2 hours ago, Ommidiam said:

Can I game and Fold at the same time" Answer -YES!

i feel like this is a bit misleading. yes, you can game and fold at the same time, tough only if you have multiple GPU's running in your system.

if you have a standard gaming machine with maybe one GPU, you can't fold and game at the same time.

Egg-Roll · February 10, 2019

3 hours ago, RollinLower said:

i feel like this is a bit misleading. yes, you can game and fold at the same time, tough only if you have multiple GPU's running in your system.

if you have a standard gaming machine with maybe one GPU, you can't fold and game at the same time.

Really depends on what you play and to what degree you are willing to accept game play at.

I've actually played and F@H on my 1070 at the same time however when it came to a specific event like for ETS2/ATS Xmas event I stopped it because it made life easier to complete the event. Just launched ATS and there was stuttering and FPS loss but I didn't change the current settings I had for during the event either:

That said I had a avg of 50 fps and even w/o the game loaded my system is at 100% CPU and 70+% ram, also didn't notice a real drop in folding performance either during that time. Once Witcher downloads in 2 ish days time (bad internet, not a bad time to buy the game tho on steam ) I'll try to play it with F@H running as well.

Oh and cars can fly...

So it really becomes a balance of what you are willing to accept along with what your computer can handle.

corrado33 · February 10, 2019

That's actually pretty cool. I typically just disable the GPU when the computer is in use, and disable CPU processing when CPU usage is over 30-40% (which means all games will stop both GPU and CPU processing.)

I wish there were a program to let you better control CPU %s for BOINC projects. Like I REALLY want to be able to schedule my computer to only use 50% of the CPU during the day, but use 100% at night.