In the end, the credits are meaningless. The only way to have any concrete gain from distributed computing is to run folding@home for the Evga team and you can get EVGA Bucks to contribute to the purchase of an EVGA card.

You imply that "not being meaningless" equals "concrete gain", something which you seem to define as "getting something of material value" (or something like that).

For me I'd say I get lots of concrete gain due to DC. It's a hobby, I can enjoy spending time on it whenever I want to (and other duties permit it). That's nothing to touch, but it's a very real "gain" for me.

... but in the end the point totals only exist to encourage people to participate. 10 points a day and 100,000 point per day are really the same thing.
The real bonus is that the computations are going to help medical science or astromomy or mathematics.

The credits also reflect the amount of contribution. Therefore they also exist to show people how good their systems are at what they're doing.

You're right that just by itself 10 or 100,000 credits don't mean anything, as it could be any arbitrary number / scaling factor. However, there's not just one of these numbers. The different amounts of credits enable comparisons between systems and projects (how valid these are is another question) and 10 credits do not equal 100,000 any more when your co-cruncher gets 1000.

MrS

Which has what to do with "ATI vs nVidia GPUs"?

MrS