However, when some new WU's were released about two months ago PPD nearly doubled for the 4000 series. Many of course thought this was the end of bonus for the 4000 series and found whatever reason they could to explain the 4000 series folding deficiency. I ended up purchasing a 4870 (Not just for folding) with hopes that more improvements would happen in the future. I clung to a few stray post in the Folding Support Forums mentioning how Standford classified the GPU WU as Small and Medium sized, with no large WU available.
Since the 4000 series has a good deal more SP's than Nvidia cards the main hope is that the larger WU with more atoms will be much more efficient.
So anyways, I found this article
http://theovalich.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/amd-folding-explained-future-reveale/
And the last paragraph seems to offer some good hope:
"So, we have shown you the problem, and now the time is for the solution. ATI can’t fix the performance issue on previous-gen hardware, but it will solve multitude of issues on Radeon 4800 boards. The team at Stanford is taking some necessary steps to re-do the workflow and introduce local memory share. This could take months, so realistic goal is to have a new client coming in Q1′09.
Once that Radeon 4870 gets fully utilized, those 800 shaders and 70% of theoretical value (700-800 GFLOPS instead of 1-1.2 TFLOPS) should be good enough for reaching the level of GTX280."
The guy cites he contacted Stanford in regards to his article so if this is accurate, folding is looking a lot brighter for the 4000 series, especially those 4870X2's some of you have.
