Quote Originally Posted by Al McAdams View Post
You have to have a 5xxx card or above. I have 3-4850s in one rig that are all useless on Einstein.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2
If I recall, Einstein's CUDA apps required 1 CPU + 0.5 GPUs to run. GPU enabling certain algorithms is like putting a turbocharger on a moped. Sure it goes a little faster, but what's the point? But, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If they wrote separate kernels so that they didn't use the OpenCL extensions for older hardware, the 48xx GPUs would still work. I've done it with Collatz knowing that AMD is slowly phasing out their CAL/Brook+ support and the Catalyst 12.4 driver on my 4830 works fine with OpenCL 1.0 apps. You just can't use texture memory, etc. because AMD didn't implement it in their earlier versions and then stopped supporting the 48xx GPUs before releasing a version which did support texture memory in OpenCL.

Note: CAL/Brook+ does support texture memory on HD 24xx and higher so it was a matter of porting vs the hardware not supporting it. They way they chose to implement it in OpenCL was not supported by the hardware because they implemented it a different way. Lazy programming if you ask me since they could have implemented both. But then, why would people upgrade to newer GPUs? It's all about marketing and the bottom line.