[GUIDE] Getting BOINC projects to only use the GPU

NOTE: This guide was created based on Microsoft Windows operating system. Steps may need to be altered to represent mac and Linux operating systems.

As well, NOT ALL Boinc projects have GPU tasks. To see if the project that you are running supports GPU computations, go to the projects' homepage and look for their applications (this is usually a link on that page labelled "Applications"

This guide is meant for those that want to use BOINC (or specific projects) only on the graphical processing unit (GPU) of their computer.


STEP 1: Open BOINC Manager on your computer and switch to "Advanced View" if you are not there already. You can do it by clicking "Advanced View" in the "My Projects" box or by pressing SHIFT+CTRL+A

Your BOINC Manager should look something like this when in Advanced View


STEP 2: Click on Advanced->Preferences. Under the processor usage tab, make sure that "Use GPU while computer is in use" is check marked or else GPU Projects will fail to run. The other options are for your own personal preferences, but I recommend check-marking "While computer is in use" or at least setting the idle time at a reasonable amount.



STEP 3: Now, go to the homepage of the project that you are using your GPU on and navigate yourself to the "Your account" link. From there, find a section named "preferences" and look for one called "Preferences for this project" and click on that. From there, go to edit the prefences, and uncheck "Use CPU" and check "Use NVIDIA GPU if present" AND/OR "Use ATI GPU if present" (choose the one(s) appropriate for your computer). Click the "Update preferences" button and you are done with the projects' preferences.

The pages that you will see may be slightly different from project to project




Repeat Step 3 for each GPU project that you have running on BOINC

STEP 4: After this is done, go back to your BOINC Manager, click the "Projects" tab, click on each project and click on the "Update" button. This will grab the latest preference files (as well as receive and send work units to and from your computer and the project server). Now, your BOINC client should now be exclusively using the GPU for the projects that you have selected. If you have done this guide after attaching to the project, the work units that are using your CPU core will complete and no more CPU units should be downloaded to the client.
Edited by gamer11200 - 7/1/10 at 9:32pm