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Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
- redisman 5y agoMy 3070 has a “low hashrate“ sticker on it. I’m sure it’s a fairly trivial firmware flag but I haven’t tried mining on it
- Tenoke 5y agoGood way to spin having only 4GB vram into an 'anti-mining feature' I guess. Of course, 4GB is typically considered the bare minimum for modern 1080p (let alone higher) gaming and this is just a budget card which was definitely not limited with any mining considerations.
- saulrh 5y agoThe fact that the entry-level card can run its clock 30% faster than the same line's top-end offering supports the story pretty solidly, IMO. Not supporting 8 GB of vram can't have given them enough breathing room to casually run the clock that fast, so this has to have been decided way up front. Like the article says, it remains to be seen whether this will also make the card bad at gaming, but I think that AMD at least had a coherent plan here.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y agoThe RX 6500 XT is a worse card than the RX480 released 5 years ago https://i.redd.it/oyxyoxmch2a81.jpg https://i.redd.it/oyxyoxmch2a81.jpg .
- narrator 5y agoThis is kind of like Google and Youtube becoming worse because they have too many of the wrong kinds of users.
- yob22 5y ago
- dragontamer 5y agoI'd expect otherwise actually. RDNA is far more efficient at gaming. GCN was compute-focused (higher TFLOPs, but weaker in practice). Case in point, micro-benchmarks show that VRAM latency is ~100 nanoseconds on RDNA, but ~300 nanoseconds on GCN. RX 6500 XT is aimed at roughly the same specs as the RX480, but should perform slightly faster in practice, along with Raytracing support, Infinity Cache and therefore faster VRAM latency (probably faster fill-rates and other microbenchmarks important to gaming), all at 107W instead of 150W. --------- As such, Rx 480 would be a better mining card, while 6500 XT would be a worse mining card, but better video game card. Its still stupid for AMD to market their cards like this, but they're not lying... (and whatever argument marketing wants to make... well... that's their job. It all looks stupid to me but I can't honestly call them out on it since it is true...) ------- Turns out that video-gamers who want more uniformity and less jitter between frames want higher-clock speeds (notice the 2000+ MHz clock speed on 6500 XT) rather than raw TFLOPs (Rx 480 ran a slow clock of ~1000MHz but had many more compute units / SIMD units computing in parallel). Width of GPU leads to more variance, because its harder to load-balance your parallelism. If you have a narrower GPU (fewer compute units) at higher speeds, its easier to reach more consistent frame times / less jitter.
- NikolaNovak 5y agoFurther, given the prices of RX480 and modern video cards, even if they were on par, if you can actually GET RX6500XT for $200 today, then: 1. It sucks from big picture perspective, as we are "back where we were 5 years ago" but 2. It's great from pragmatic perspective, as we are otherwise today in "Wish I could afford a card from 5 years ago" / "there's no such thing as a budget GPU" stage.
- jagger27 5y agoIsn't it a power budget and heat dissipation thing? For example the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 GPUs have pretty similar architectures, but the PS5 has fewer compute units at a higher frequency. Surely Microsoft would have loved to clock theirs as high as Sony. PS5: 10.28 Teraflops, 36 Compute Units running at 2.23GHz (variable frequency) XSX: 12.11 Teraflops, 52 Compute Units running at 1.825GHz (fixed)
- zozbot234 5y ago> but the PS5 has fewer compute units at a higher frequency. Yes, this seems to be what's happening here. Less power used on memory bandwidth, means more is available for other things. This card is not so much "bad at mining" and more like trying to design for a different niche that might be underserved by all the "good at mining" GPU's.
- torginus 5y agoI love how Mark Cerny managed to spin Sony having to raise the clock frequency of the PS5 GPU to compete with a the XSX's TFlop specs as an advantage. GPUs tend to be memory-bandwidth bound - if you play around with raising the clock frequency by 10% from stock on most GPUs, you won't get 10% more fps, likewise if you drop the frequency by 10%, you won't lose 10% fps. But with the power consumption scaling with the square of the frequency, the difference in power draw can be absolutely significant. That's the reason many people (me among them) chose to underclock their 5700XTs
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- cammikebrown 5y agoMy 1060 3GB can still run every game I throw at it (except Cyberpunk). MS Flight Sim runs great at high, for instance, especially after the performance update.
- wnevets 5y agoWhat FPS do you consider "great"?
- zamadatix 5y agoLooks like ~60 (more in rural areas, less in cities) for 1080p low on that card... which isn't fantastic but better than I expected. The limiting factor in cities seems to be the VRAM as the 1060 6 GB version can bench about the same flying through New York City bumped up to medium and shows using nearly 5 GB of VRAM while doing it.
- cammikebrown 5y agoFor a flight sim, 45fps. Forza Horizon 5 runs at 60+ on high settings (despite telling me I need more memory, it doesn't crash). I mostly play CS, which runs at 200+ (yes I know it's an older game, Doom Eternal also runs at 60+ on high).
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- bored_itworker 5y ago4GB ram is not enough for a good 1080p gaming card. You'd most likely only be able to play esport titles on the 6500 XT. I went from a 3GB 1060 to a 6GB 5600 XT and it makes the extra frame buffer makes a massive difference as new games are getting very demanding to run, even on 1080p.
- CactusOnFire 5y agoQuestion for the experts in the comments: I'm playing around more with deep learning as of late. Are the same technical specifications one would look for in a 'miner-friendly' GPU the same ones I'd look for in a GPU for Neural-net computations?
- jagger27 5y agoKey pull quote: > there isn’t an 8GB version of the 6500 XT. The 6500 XT also uses a 64-bit memory interface It only comes with 4GB of RAM on a narrow bus which makes it useless for Ethereum mining. It doesn't seem like it uses the same "LHR" technique as Nvidia.
- qayxc 5y agoThis still doesn't explain why they cheaped out on the media engine side. While I can see a justification for the lack of 4K H264 encode support (kind of pointless for a card at this level of performance), removing the AV1 decoder and H265/HEVC encoder is something I don't understand. This makes the card completely useless for both game streaming and media creation for no discernible reason.
- taspeotis 5y ago> We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke.
- vlunkr 5y agoThat's a deep cut that I really appreciate.
- snicker7 5y agoAMD consumer cards are unusable for GPGPU. Utter garbage. It’s not just mining. I would not have bought them if it weren’t for their open source driver. I hope Intel Arc fares better.
- sudosysgen 5y agoThe higher-end cards are inherently very very usable for GPGPU, it's just the tooling around them that sucks. As for lower end cards, that's because they are low-end.
- rolleiflex 5y agoYes, they have the Radeon Open Compute project (ROCM) but they seem to be intent on following the tensorflow from a few stable versions behind. Additionally, and likely this is not something they can do anything about, but if you are using a Linux VM instead of running it natively, ROCM does not work. I had attempted to do this to get some use of the AMD GPU that was in my Mac — no dice. The holy grail would be a direct replacement backend that could be fed into TF, like CUDA.
- sudosysgen 5y agoIf you are using a VM, you can never use your GPU unless you have a very expensive one or a spare GPU to passthrough. ROCm has a direct replacement backend that can even take CUDA code (it's designed to be incredibly similar). It's called HIP. It's just that no one wants to support it. That is actually how TensorFlow on AMD works (mostly), and you can compile the latest stable release that way.
- tim-- 5y ago6600XT pass through works fine on QEMU/virtd. There is no need to have multiple GPUs in your machine to have a passable setup. I can boot into Linux, and swap into Windows in 2 seconds with this setup. I have a dirty 20 line Bash script that deals with detaching the console, and passing the right things to the right place, but it all works. ROCm on consumer cards does not work well. The tooling sucks. Massively. I don't understand why AMD doesn't have an extra team of 20 devs working just on the tooling. Using DirectML with Windows Subsystem for Linux gives you better ML GPGPU support then AMDs native tooling.
- yob22 5y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoMan, I'm glad I snuck a 1080ti purchase in a few years ago when BTC was crashing hard. Of course, being Nvidia means it'll suck if I have to transition to a Linux Desktop before the next cryptoshit market crash, but if it takes that long then they've probably managed to kill of high-end PC gaming along with the environment and I'll have bigger problems.
- FeistySkink 5y agoNVIDIA is finally opening up to Linux and working on better support in their proprietary drivers: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Wayland-Friendly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4...
- nerdponx 5y agoThe latest Nvidia drivers have been working mostly perfectly with my modest 1060 under Fedora 35. Some hiccups resuming from sleep, but only rarely.
- formerly_proven 5y agofwiw I've used nvidia drivers through DKMS for a long time and never really had any issues with it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI'm afraid it isn't worth much, considering how many times a Linux Desktop user has told me "I haven't really had any problems with it" about something that ended up giving me no end of problems.
- formerly_proven 5y agoThe problems of an even more infinite configuration space than what Windows offers...
- vmception 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrfinn 5y agoWorld really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.
- bluecalm 5y agoYou don't need a specific ban. Just even the playing field for traditional finance. Either make cryptocurrencies follow normal banking/financial laws or make laws for traditional finance more liberal. Cryptocurrencies and especially PoW based ones are a terrible, slow, inefficient and vulnerable technology which wouldn't survive a day of fair competition.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoWhat is “fair competition”? Can you define it?
- bluecalm 5y agoTechnologies being subject you the same rules. The reason I can buy drugs, play online poker, request a ransom or just send money to an unknown at the other end of the world with crypto but can't with a bank transfer isn't technical. The only reason is that banks have to comply to regulation while crypto doesn't. There are a lot of regulatory burden when trying to make a financial service. KYC, anti money laundering, reporting, privacy, data storage etc. There is basically none (that is enforced anyway) with crypto. That's the only reason it got traction. The technology is terrible. It's hard to come up with something more inefficient, expensive and hard to use. The one and only reason it's used for anything is that it evades regulatory burden. It's literally "let's burn a lot of coal to run our steam powered car because steam powered cars are not subject to traffic laws" kind of situation. Fix and enforce the law and the steam car disappears. The same will happen to cryptocurrency.
- 5y ago
- noyeastguy 5y agoThis will be an interesting experiment to see what happens when these companies spurn the customers that created the conditions for this market to exist. I hope Apple or another company is smart enough to use this opportunity to scoop up disenfranchised customers and let AMD and NVIDEA waste more time serving the Ponzi industrial complex.
- willis936 5y agoThe 6500 XT is bad at everything. I haven't bought a dGPU with 4 GB of VRAM in a decade. This is just PR.
- hartator 5y ago> What remains to be seen is whether the design decisions that make the 6500 XT sub-optimal for mining also make it sub-optimal for gaming. Yes, I would be worried that for certain games; performance will be oddly super bad.
- eggy 5y agoNext they'll throttle internet speeds for miners like was proposed to slow down HFT, which now can place an order in the time it takes a photon to go 90 ft [2016 reference]. Just make the card the best it can be, meet the demand, and make money AMD, NVIDIA, etc.
- captainbland 5y agoBad at crypto and at games if the specs are anything to go by. It's true the 6600 and 6700 series cards punch quite a bit above where you'd think they'd be relative to the 6800 parts but this one looks like an absolute bargain basement card. Who knows, maybe AMD is going to pull another rabbit out of the hat? Seems unlikely with a 64-bit bus and 4gb vram though.