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AMD 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

AMD 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    If 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 ago
      6600XT 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.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        >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. That's a matter of opinion I suppose, but I don't personally find that passable. >Using DirectML with Windows Subsystem for Linux gives you better ML GPGPU support then AMDs native tooling. DirectML sucks even more than ROCm, IMO. Also, WSL sucks more than a normal VM.
        tim-- 5y ago
        > I don't personally find that passable What is a setup that would be passable then? I think a setup like the one that I have described [I believe] would be impossible with Hyper-V or ESXi (though, not that I have even attempted it with either).
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        I agree witht the latter part about Hyper-V or ESXi, for it to work one would need a virtualizable GPU or two GPUs, so that both OSes can have a graphical environment concurrently.
- snicker7 5y ago
  Not even. ROCm does not support any current-generation enterprise cards. Compare this to Nvidia or even Intel where I can run GPGPU API's (CUDA, oneAPI) on low-end, consumer-grade hardware. The problem, ultimately, is that AMD does not even care.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    It's not officially supported, but it does seem to work, don't know if there are any bugs. I agree that AMD is dropping the ball.
torginus 5y ago
Isn't it because of CUDA?
- qayxc 5y ago
  Yes and no. AMD uses different architectures for their consumer grade hardware and their HPC stuff as well (i.e. RDNA vs. CDNA). CUDA support (or rather lack thereof, which isn't AMD's fault) plays a major role w.r.t. software support, but AMD's compute architecture isn't DL-focused either. The MI250X compute part for example has a FP16 to FP32 ratio of 8:1 and a FP32 to FP64 ratio of 1:1; in other words it's an absolute beast at GPGPU compute. The 6900XT on the other hand has a FP16 to FP32 ratio of just 2:1 and a FP32 to FP64 ratio of 1:16 (i.e. it's severely restricted at high precision workloads and OK at half-precision). Comparing this to the specs of NVIDIA cards, they're still vastly superior on paper. The consumer versions of Ampere only get 1:1 (FP16:FP32) and 1:64(!!! FP32:FP64) respectively. But then again, NVIDIA cards feature dedicated "tensor cores", which have no equivalent on AMD consumer grade hardware. The main selling point for NVIDIA, however, is software support and mindshare. They started to buy themselves into academia in the late 2000s by sponsoring labs and providing a vast ecosystem of software libraries for deep learning and GPGPU support in general. This not only helped kickstarting the deep learning revolution but also tied their hardware and brand name to GPGPU, which basically became synonymous with CUDA at that point.
  - torginus 5y ago
    Ah I see. But wouldn't that mean that hardware-wise, consumer grade AMD stuff is better than for GPGPU, than consumer grade NVIDIA stuff? With the exception of AI and software support, of course.
    - qayxc 5y ago
      The previous generations of AMD hardware were super popular among crypto miners for that reason. Most other software focused exclusively on CUDA, so GPGPU on AMD cards is not well supported despite the potential. Blender is a popular example for this. After discontinuing cross-vendor OpenCL support, which effectively limited GPU acceleration to NVIDIA cards, they added support for AMD cards in the latest version. Even then, only the latest generation of AMD cards is supported for some reason. Other renderers like OctaneRender still only support CUDA. The situation is just as bleak in video editing software, were major companies like Adobe only support NVIDA and Intel (at least on Windows) or have poor OpenCL support (which users then blame on AMD of course). There is some hope that software support for GPGPU without CUDA (maybe using Vulkan Compute?) will improve later this year with Intel (re-)entering the discrete desktop GPU market.

AMD 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 ago

The 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    6600XT 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.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      >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. That's a matter of opinion I suppose, but I don't personally find that passable. >Using DirectML with Windows Subsystem for Linux gives you better ML GPGPU support then AMDs native tooling. DirectML sucks even more than ROCm, IMO. Also, WSL sucks more than a normal VM.
      - tim-- 5y ago
        > I don't personally find that passable What is a setup that would be passable then? I think a setup like the one that I have described [I believe] would be impossible with Hyper-V or ESXi (though, not that I have even attempted it with either).
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        I agree witht the latter part about Hyper-V or ESXi, for it to work one would need a virtualizable GPU or two GPUs, so that both OSes can have a graphical environment concurrently.
snicker7 5y ago
Not even. ROCm does not support any current-generation enterprise cards. Compare this to Nvidia or even Intel where I can run GPGPU API's (CUDA, oneAPI) on low-end, consumer-grade hardware. The problem, ultimately, is that AMD does not even care.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  It's not officially supported, but it does seem to work, don't know if there are any bugs. I agree that AMD is dropping the ball.

torginus 5y ago

Isn't it because of CUDA?

qayxc 5y ago
Yes and no. AMD uses different architectures for their consumer grade hardware and their HPC stuff as well (i.e. RDNA vs. CDNA). CUDA support (or rather lack thereof, which isn't AMD's fault) plays a major role w.r.t. software support, but AMD's compute architecture isn't DL-focused either. The MI250X compute part for example has a FP16 to FP32 ratio of 8:1 and a FP32 to FP64 ratio of 1:1; in other words it's an absolute beast at GPGPU compute. The 6900XT on the other hand has a FP16 to FP32 ratio of just 2:1 and a FP32 to FP64 ratio of 1:16 (i.e. it's severely restricted at high precision workloads and OK at half-precision). Comparing this to the specs of NVIDIA cards, they're still vastly superior on paper. The consumer versions of Ampere only get 1:1 (FP16:FP32) and 1:64(!!! FP32:FP64) respectively. But then again, NVIDIA cards feature dedicated "tensor cores", which have no equivalent on AMD consumer grade hardware. The main selling point for NVIDIA, however, is software support and mindshare. They started to buy themselves into academia in the late 2000s by sponsoring labs and providing a vast ecosystem of software libraries for deep learning and GPGPU support in general. This not only helped kickstarting the deep learning revolution but also tied their hardware and brand name to GPGPU, which basically became synonymous with CUDA at that point.
- torginus 5y ago
  Ah I see. But wouldn't that mean that hardware-wise, consumer grade AMD stuff is better than for GPGPU, than consumer grade NVIDIA stuff? With the exception of AI and software support, of course.
  - qayxc 5y ago
    The previous generations of AMD hardware were super popular among crypto miners for that reason. Most other software focused exclusively on CUDA, so GPGPU on AMD cards is not well supported despite the potential. Blender is a popular example for this. After discontinuing cross-vendor OpenCL support, which effectively limited GPU acceleration to NVIDIA cards, they added support for AMD cards in the latest version. Even then, only the latest generation of AMD cards is supported for some reason. Other renderers like OctaneRender still only support CUDA. The situation is just as bleak in video editing software, were major companies like Adobe only support NVIDA and Intel (at least on Windows) or have poor OpenCL support (which users then blame on AMD of course). There is some hope that software support for GPGPU without CUDA (maybe using Vulkan Compute?) will improve later this year with Intel (re-)entering the discrete desktop GPU market.