I have been a long term supporter of SETI but due to the regular outages of there services I have descided to use CP now. I like the look of the graphics but find when they are running they use 50% of my CPU resources.
My system includes
AMD XP1600+ (oc\'ed from 1400mhz to 1607mhz)
9600XT Graphics Card
512 Mb DDR
Windows 2000 Pro

I would assume that all graphics tasks should be able to be taken by the GPU leaving the CPU for the primary calculations but this does not seem to be the case

On my system AMD 64 3200+ it takes 50% too

Founder of

<a href="http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/team_display.php?teamid=36"><img src="http://www.ug-abi.de/2008/projekt1.jpg"></a>

yeah I'm not quite sure why graphics takes up so much, it's straight OpenGL and my video card is supposed to be doing all OpenGL "on the chip" but I get 40-50%. Something else for us to look at I guess!

This also seems to happen when running the model as a screensaver, even when the monitor is set to power off when not in use. I ran it as a screensaver overnight for 10 hours with monitor maually switched off and only got about 5 hours of CPU time used!

&gt; yeah I'm not quite sure why graphics takes up so much, it's straight OpenGL
&gt; and my video card is supposed to be doing all OpenGL "on the chip" but I get
&gt; 40-50%. Something else for us to look at I guess!
&gt;
How about having 'use at most %% CPU cycles for visualization". If i remember right, SETI has st like that. If graphics isn't fast enough just skip some frames.
Still wierd on those fast machines with Open GL; perhaps some clean-up of vis procedures may help?

As far as I can see, it's now calculating the thousands of stars coming towards us, plus the whole Earth's weather. You may be able to speed it up by allowing to set a minimum of stars plotted on the screen around Earth (or allow us to set it to zero, else why not have a nice moon spin around as well? ;)).

Yet there's even a worse problem: if you start spinning the globe, even at minimal, the graphics take up 100% of the CPU.

Are you sure, Carl, that BOINC is using the GPU at that moment, not the CPU?
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Jordâ„¢

&gt; This also seems to happen when running the model as a screensaver, even when
&gt; the monitor is set to power off when not in use. I ran it as a screensaver
&gt; overnight for 10 hours with monitor maually switched off and only got about 5
&gt; hours of CPU time used!
&gt;
My experience also, which is ridiculous, not how I want my resources used,especially since the operating sytem turns my monitor off after 15 minutes when I don't turn it off myself.

However, I found a cure, and that is just set the screensaver to [None] (right click on the desktop and go to the Screen Svare tab). This turns off BOINC, but restarting it does not reinstall the screen saver. So now the model gets all my idle time.

It is unfortunate that BOINC installs as screensaver by default. That is not desirable when running CPDN, and possibly other projects. CPDN graphics consume processing power because they actually show in detail how the model is processing. This is a bit of a waste when you aren't looking.

Bruce,
No screensaver has long been the recommended proceedure, ever since it was found to use up a lot cpu cycles.
Also, leave BOINC on the Transfer tab if you have it minimised on the screen. Even the text changes on 'Work' takes up a small amount of cpu time.

Les