AMD Company became the first video chip producer , whose production obtained support from the client part of folding@Home project - it was possible to execute those calculations by AMD video chip since September 2006. NVIDIA video cards obtained support at the software level of folding@Home only in the summer of 2008.
Associates report that increase in the speed of folding@Home project in proportion to update of radeon model number almost ceased. In particular, Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 demonstrates close results, and newest video card radeon HD 5870 with 1 Gb GDDR- 5 memories in this sense differed a little .
As experts explain, problem consists in the fact that the client program for Folding@Home is written in Brook+, and the new generation of AMD video card with directX 11 support counts on OpenCL. Thus developers will not renew the part client Of folding@Home, the use of NVIDIA card will provide higher results. Let us note that in other applications types GPGPU video chip AMD does not demonstrate a similar delay , this only a special case.