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AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no

AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (often the case in GPGPU) this advantage disappears. Really all I care about is a good OpenCL driver implementation, especially OpenCL 2.2 support would be extremely attractive.

llukas 7y ago
Did you manage to achieve 1TB/s? https://www.sisoftware.co.uk/2019/08/01/amd-vega2-gpgpu/ https://www.sisoftware.co.uk/2019/08/01/amd-vega2-gpgpu/ BW test over there shows 627GB/s of actual BW.
- kiddico 7y ago
  Not saying that it can hit 1TB/s, but I wouldn't put too much trust in one benchmark. I got 704 GB/s on my machine[1] using their test. [1] https://imgur.com/a/tq3nEz5 https://imgur.com/a/tq3nEz5
danieldk 7y ago
AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. The Radeon VII is also pretty fast in training transformer networks. In some models that I trained, it was only ~25% slower than our Quadro RTX 5000s.
- nl 7y ago
  On Tensorflow ROC (or whatever the name is?)
  - danieldk 7y ago
    Yes, I used Tensorflow from AMD's ROCm repositories. However, the performance difference compared to upstream Tensorflow was not very large anymore.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bamboozled 7y ago
I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup. As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain. A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.
- castis 7y ago
  I hear that, I had a laptop some years ago with an Nvidia Optimus card in it. It was quite the frustrating experience. I got it to work well enough with bumblebee on Ubuntu but it never felt solid. I had hoped maybe the experience had gotten better but I guess not. I'll continue steering clear.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux, as long as you were ok using their non-free drivers. Why was it so problematic for you?
  - bayindirh 7y ago
    > Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux... Unless you want to do some cutting edge stuff with it. We're begging nVidia to fix their DPMS implementation over DisplayPort for years now. Oh, I forgot that nVidia drivers do not make enabling VSync easy for video/compositing overlays for ~6 years? I have to disable all optimizations and lose 50% performance to enable VSync in a compositing or video layer. Yes, most of it works but some annoying parts do not work, and nVidia doesn't make anything easier. This is on a GTX680 card. It was king of the hill when I first bought it.
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    Nvidia used to be the less bad option, but AMD's transition to AMDGPU leapfrogged that a long time ago. They're still focused on their proprietary drivers, and naturally that means that they're way behind on supporting modern kernels. That's an issue if you have other hardware that only had support added recently. Their integration with X11's autoconfig also tends to have.. problems. Nouveau basically doesn't work for their modern GPUs. My work laptop has a 1660Ti, and X11/Nouveau still can't render anything with it. Wayland/Gnome/Nouveau kinda sorta works, but I'd rather not have to use Wayland if I can avoid it. Nvidia's support for PRIME is lacking. Their official stance was that you should restart your X11 session every time you wanted to swap. Bumblebee kind of worked, but was very slow and unstable. It looks like they finally implemented support for dynamic PRIME now, but of course they had to name their trigger environment variable something else, so that existing scripts for AMD PRIME wouldn't work.
MaxBarraclough 7y ago
> Really all I care about is a good OpenCL driver implementation, especially OpenCL 2.2 support would be extremely attractive. nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1. Presumably this is a conscious decision - they'd rather invest in CUDA. I have no idea what AMD is up to regarding OpenCL. Have they just quietly dropped all support? [0][1] Intel seem to be doing better, with support for OpenCL 2.1, with support for both CPU and GPU targets. [2] [0] https://community.amd.com/thread/232600 https://community.amd.com/thread/232600 [1] https://community.amd.com/thread/233197 https://community.amd.com/thread/233197 [2] https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-drivers https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-drivers
- kouteiheika 7y ago
  > nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1. This hasn't been true for quite some time now. They support 1.2.
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    Interesting - their website says 1.1 [0] but they apparently released a driver in 2015 which supported 1.2 on certain chipsets [1]. [0] https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/29607373/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/29607373/

llukas 7y ago

Did you manage to achieve 1TB/s? https://www.sisoftware.co.uk/2019/08/01/amd-vega2-gpgpu/ https://www.sisoftware.co.uk/2019/08/01/amd-vega2-gpgpu/ BW test over there shows 627GB/s of actual BW.

kiddico 7y ago
Not saying that it can hit 1TB/s, but I wouldn't put too much trust in one benchmark. I got 704 GB/s on my machine[1] using their test. [1] https://imgur.com/a/tq3nEz5 https://imgur.com/a/tq3nEz5

danieldk 7y ago

AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. The Radeon VII is also pretty fast in training transformer networks. In some models that I trained, it was only ~25% slower than our Quadro RTX 5000s.

nl 7y ago
On Tensorflow ROC (or whatever the name is?)
- danieldk 7y ago
  Yes, I used Tensorflow from AMD's ROCm repositories. However, the performance difference compared to upstream Tensorflow was not very large anymore.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bamboozled 7y ago

I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup. As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain. A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.

castis 7y ago
I hear that, I had a laptop some years ago with an Nvidia Optimus card in it. It was quite the frustrating experience. I got it to work well enough with bumblebee on Ubuntu but it never felt solid. I had hoped maybe the experience had gotten better but I guess not. I'll continue steering clear.
SkyMarshal 7y ago
Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux, as long as you were ok using their non-free drivers. Why was it so problematic for you?
- bayindirh 7y ago
  > Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux... Unless you want to do some cutting edge stuff with it. We're begging nVidia to fix their DPMS implementation over DisplayPort for years now. Oh, I forgot that nVidia drivers do not make enabling VSync easy for video/compositing overlays for ~6 years? I have to disable all optimizations and lose 50% performance to enable VSync in a compositing or video layer. Yes, most of it works but some annoying parts do not work, and nVidia doesn't make anything easier. This is on a GTX680 card. It was king of the hill when I first bought it.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  Nvidia used to be the less bad option, but AMD's transition to AMDGPU leapfrogged that a long time ago. They're still focused on their proprietary drivers, and naturally that means that they're way behind on supporting modern kernels. That's an issue if you have other hardware that only had support added recently. Their integration with X11's autoconfig also tends to have.. problems. Nouveau basically doesn't work for their modern GPUs. My work laptop has a 1660Ti, and X11/Nouveau still can't render anything with it. Wayland/Gnome/Nouveau kinda sorta works, but I'd rather not have to use Wayland if I can avoid it. Nvidia's support for PRIME is lacking. Their official stance was that you should restart your X11 session every time you wanted to swap. Bumblebee kind of worked, but was very slow and unstable. It looks like they finally implemented support for dynamic PRIME now, but of course they had to name their trigger environment variable something else, so that existing scripts for AMD PRIME wouldn't work.

MaxBarraclough 7y ago

> Really all I care about is a good OpenCL driver implementation, especially OpenCL 2.2 support would be extremely attractive. nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1. Presumably this is a conscious decision - they'd rather invest in CUDA. I have no idea what AMD is up to regarding OpenCL. Have they just quietly dropped all support? [0][1] Intel seem to be doing better, with support for OpenCL 2.1, with support for both CPU and GPU targets. [2] [0] https://community.amd.com/thread/232600 https://community.amd.com/thread/232600 [1] https://community.amd.com/thread/233197 https://community.amd.com/thread/233197 [2] https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-drivers https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-drivers

kouteiheika 7y ago
> nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1. This hasn't been true for quite some time now. They support 1.2.
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  Interesting - their website says 1.1 [0] but they apparently released a driver in 2015 which supported 1.2 on certain chipsets [1]. [0] https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/29607373/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/29607373/