Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

So I tried out Folding@Home on the PS3 last night, and watched the big molecule jitter around on the screen and the work unit counter tell me it would be done at around 8am the next morning. I think it was about 9 hours or so total. That’s not terrible for a work unit, I thought, remembering how long it took to do a work unit for Seti@Home when I last ran that on my desktop.

Tonight on a lark I download their Windows XP client, load it on my PC, and fire it up. My desktop’s pretty speedy, with an AMD 4000 CPU which is single core if memory serves. The big box showed up, numbers appeared, and a big chunky molecule appeared. It took a while but another one appeared in its place. Not a jitter to say the least. How long until my desktop finishes a work unit?

One hundred and four days. Woah.

Kotaku noticed that the new PS3 version of the Folding client is already dominating the stats for the Folding project and with speed like this, I can see why.

Via Kotaku.

Update #1: I left my PC alone for a couple of hours and when I came back the work unit estimate had fallen to 1 day 7 hrs remaining. The software also shows seconds per frame, and each work until is 5000 frames. My deskop shows a statistic of 25 seconds per frame while the PS3 is showing 0.0774 seconds per frame. A little bit of math makes that out to be 6.45 hours per work unit frames on the PS3 and 34.71 hours per work unit on the PC, or the PS3 running the work units 5.4 times faster than the PC.