Screensaver?

[talltexan2020]

I know this has been beaten to death but …. In the past installing FAH resulted in a visual screensaver - I liked it - loading 8.4.9 opens to a control panel of sorts, and it’s not terrible inspiring (hey even us old techs like flashy shiny things here and there instead of a static gui.

I looked at screen savers on my Acer laptop and have tons of ram and tons of disk space - no matter what zi do it won’t show up in screensavers - I hate asking for help, but if I can’t answer this, I’m going to need help of another kind …. Professional help

Can anyone point me in the right direction where you had a visual representation as a sceeensaver?

Mike

[Demmers]

You can't any more (as far as I know). The latest version is online only. I think it's been quite a few years since the screensaver was a thing.

[arisu]

I'm working on something like that for myself, combining the viewFrame json files and the 5-minute interval checkpoint files to create a higher-temporal resolution trajectory that can be fed into VMD or another visualizer. For a WU that takes 8 hours, that's a total of almost 200 snapshots. Then the animation can be made smoother with interpolation, either on the trajectory files themselves or on the video stream (converting to video is important to avoid stealing CPU or GPU power from folding). I just have to find out how to convert the json viewFrame format, which looks undocumented, into XTC.

Here are just a few preliminary examples (with smoothing and no interpolation, using only the 5 minute checkpoints):





These are AChE next to some kind of inhibitor. Each frame is 5 minutes of processing time on my computer for a real work unit.

[muziqaz]

If you are folding on GPU, more complex screensaver would rob you of your GPU resources, even when GPU is not fully loaded from FAH. I don't know exact reason, on why v8 has no screensaver, but even if dev is planning on adding it, it is at the bottom of the priority list, I'm sure.

I really loved PS3 type of visualiser, I think I made a request for it in FAHviewer, again, not sure if it ever gonna be implemented.

And yes, screensavers are dead in this day and age. Plus, a lot of GPUs have major issues in resuming from monitor sleep, or recovering from screensaver

[arisu]

That's true. In my testing, the only way to have effectively no impact on folding is to encode the animation as a low-complexity video codec like AVC Constrained Baseline each time a folding frame passes, then play it in a loop. Animating it in real-time with OpenGL interferes with folding.

What I'm writing won't be a true screensaver, just a full-screen application that exits on mouse movement or keyboard press, which should help with GPU compatibility issues.

[muziqaz]

That's true. In my testing, the only way to have effectively no impact on folding is to encode the animation as a low-complexity video codec like AVC Constrained Baseline each time a folding frame passes, then play it in a loop. Animating it in real-time with OpenGL interferes with folding.

What I'm writing won't be a true screensaver, just a full-screen application that exits on mouse movement or keyboard press, which should help with GPU compatibility issues.

I have no idea what I am talking about, but you could try harnessing GPU's built in dedicated hardware accelerators for video transcoding/playback, or whatever else they are using to also accelerate browsers.
Web based fahviewer works very smoothly

[arisu]

The question is how much PCIe bandwidth FAH needs. I think it's a lot since each kernel is small and often runs for just microseconds right? Using hardware decode like NVDEC means the bitstream has to be passed to the GPU and the bitstream is pretty high bitrate. The GPU itself would not struggle because the video decode hardware is a dedicated ASIC (it doesn't make use of the shader cores) and would contribute almost nothing to the TDP.

Then again, even decoding on the CPU still means sending a feed to the GPU. So I don't know. I'm not familiar enough with GPU architecture. I just know that OpenGL rendering saps up more resources than pre-animating and then playing back what amounts to a recording of the animation in a loop.

[muziqaz]

Pcie X4 is the minimum requirement, but after that there is not much of the difference between generations and throughput