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AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

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Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#111

Post by opencl »

silotis wrote: post #95
opencl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temperature monitoring for the first gen Ryzen chips has been in the kernel for about a year. The patch for second gen is there but narrowly missed the 5.0 release window, so it should land in the first release after 5.0. Intel is a bit faster about this but it's not like they have perfect day 1 kernel support either. i.e. temperature monitoring drivers for both first gen Ryzen and Coffee Lake landed in 4.15. At the…

Based on personal experience temperature monitoring on Coffee Lake worked just fine with 4.14. I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a breaking change in Intel's interface for this since at least Sandy Bridge.

Interesting, 4.15 had a patch specifically for Coffee Lake thermal support. Maybe it was specific to the mobile chips.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1711.2/00864.html

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#112

Post by keldaris »

dragontamer wrote: post #101
alanaktion wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AMD's innovation in this space, but for high-end gaming Nvidia is still destroying them in raw performance. RTX and G-Sync are definitely stupid, though they are adding limited Freesync compatibility to recent cards now. If AMD made something that'd beat my 1080 Ti for a reasonable price, I'd definitely buy it. I certainly don't like Nvidia's Linux drivers, but the majority of my non-IGPU needs are Windows-bas…

Well, the Radeon VII looks like it is around the 1080 Ti / 2080 for $699. I think the main issue with AMD is that their compute drivers are clearly behind NVidia's. However, their ROCm development is now on Github, so we can publicly see releases and various development actions. AMD has been active on Github, so the drivers are clearly improving. But I think it is surprising to see just how far behind they are. ROCm…

From my perspective (computational physics, not machine learning) the situation with GPU compute is very simple. If you are fine writing everything from scratch and won't need the CUDA ecosystem (which is really all there is for good sparse matrix, linear algebra, etc. support), write OpenCL 1.2 (or even GLSL if it's a visualization-heavy code with relatively simple compute) and buy whatever gets you the best compute/$ at that time. Otherwise - and this probably includes most people in this space - you have no choice but to keep using CUDA. There is just no meaningful compute ecosystem for AMD GPUs, sadly.

I'm still very much looking forward to the Radeon VII due to the memory bandwidth, since I'm currently working on bandwidth-constrained CFD simulations. But that's a specific usecase and I write most things from scratch anyway.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#113

Post by RussianCow »

zepearl wrote: post #107
RussianCow wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loudness has more to do with each individual card and how the manufacturer built/designed it than it does with AMD/Nvidia. Read GPU reviews online and you will see that, even within the same model (e.g. RX 580), some cards are known for being unreasonably loud while others are near silent.

You're fuzzy/vague and you assume that I did not perform a selection of what I decided to buy at that time and you state about huge differences of loudness between brands of the same chip without posting proof.

I didn't assume anything, I just wanted to point this out to clarify that fan noise isn't just about the card itself. As for proof, there are lots of sites (Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, etc) that compare different brands of cards by noise level—search for reviews of whatever card you're looking at and you're likely to find a chart comparing them. I've also personally experienced some rather large differences by switching brands of the same card, with both AMD and Nvidia.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#114

Post by dragontamer »

keldaris wrote: post #112
dragontamer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the Radeon VII looks like it is around the 1080 Ti / 2080 for $699. I think the main issue with AMD is that their compute drivers are clearly behind NVidia's. However, their ROCm development is now on Github, so we can publicly see releases and various development actions. AMD has been active on Github, so the drivers are clearly improving. But I think it is surprising to see just how far behind they are. ROCm…

From my perspective (computational physics, not machine learning) the situation with GPU compute is very simple. If you are fine writing everything from scratch and won't need the CUDA ecosystem (which is really all there is for good sparse matrix, linear algebra, etc. support), write OpenCL 1.2 (or even GLSL if it's a visualization-heavy code with relatively simple compute) and buy whatever gets you the best compute…

AMD's hardware is stupid-good from a compute perspective. Vega64 is $399, but renders Blender (on AMDGPU-PRO drivers) incredibly fast, like 2080 or 1080 Ti level. That's basically the main use case I bought a Vega for (which is why I'm very disappointed in ROCm's current bug which breaks Blender)

If you really can use those 500GB/s HBM2 stacks + 10+ TFlops of power, the Vega is absolutely a monster, at far cheaper prices than the 2080.

I really wonder why video games FPS numbers are so much better on NVidia. The compute power is clearly there, but it just doesn't show in FPS tests.

---

Anyway, my custom code tests are to try and build a custom constraint-solver for a particular game AI I'm writing. Constraint solvers share similarities to Relational Databases (in particular: the relational join operator) which has been accelerated on GPUs before.

So I too am a bit fortunate that my specific use cases actually enable me to try ROCm. But any "popular" thing (Deep Learning, Matrix Multiplications, etc. etc.) benefits so heavily from CUDA's ecosystem that its hard to say no to NVidia these days. CUDA is just more mature, with more libraries that help the programmer.

AMD's system is still "some assembly required", especially if you run into a compiler bug or care about performance... (gotta study up on that Vega ISA...) And unfortunately, GPU Assembly language is a fair bit more mysterious than CPU Assembly Language. But I expect any decent low-level programmer to figure it out eventually...

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#115

Post by zepearl »

deelowe wrote: post #105
zanny wrote: post #82

A lot of people are talking along the lines of "oh AMD is nice but... Nvidia". No, in 2019 all AMD GPUs this decade support OpenGL through 4.5, support Vulkan, and still really don't have a great OpenCL situation (rocm is out of tree on every distro and only supprts parts of 2.0 still). For gaming though, theres no reason not to get an AMD GPU. They are at near performance parity with Nvidia relative to their Windows…

Whats wrong with rtx (other than it being a bleeding edge tech that isn't well supported yet)?

I'm a "n00b" in this sector, so pls. feel free to correct me:

1) RTX is meant to be linked to "raytracing".

2a) Raytracing in general computes a scene by computing how photons are affected by matter - e.g. a full reflection by an absolutely smooth non-absorbing surface or a partial reflection&path_divergence done by liquids, etc... .

2b) In the simulation, the photon that "bounces off" a surface is then "rebounced" by another surface and so on, and this creates a picture similar to the one we use to see in the real world.

3) RTX maybe cuts the whole "rebouncing" and generation of photons a bit short, meaning that there isn't really any new next-gen technology but it's just a bit more processing power that is available to do some additional parallel short/semi-pure raytracing stuff, but which does not work when your scene is complex and it does need many reflections "rebounded" many times.

Again: this is just my initial understanding.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#116

Post by zepearl »

RussianCow wrote: post #113
zepearl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fuzzy/vague and you assume that I did not perform a selection of what I decided to buy at that time and you state about huge differences of loudness between brands of the same chip without posting proof.

I didn't assume anything, I just wanted to point this out to clarify that fan noise isn't just about the card itself. As for proof, there are lots of sites (Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, etc) that compare different brands of cards by noise level—search for reviews of whatever card you're looking at and you're likely to find a chart comparing them. I've also personally experienced some rather large differences by switchi…

>>I just wanted to point this out...

"this" what?

>>As for proof, there are lots of sites..

Pls. post the direct links to the specific pages that allow us to see such a direct comparison or to at least see data which can be compared.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#117

Post by jpk »

yellowapple wrote: post #91
jpk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leading with an accusation of substance abuse isn't civil or productive. Your comment may well be factually correct, but your tone here is inappropriate. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You must be smoking some real good stuff if you think "What are you smoking?" is meant to be a literal accusation of substance abuse.

I am well aware of the colloquialism. My point is that it violates the site's comment guidelines.

'When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."'

This comment can be shortened to eliminate the first sentence, which is needlessly rude.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#119

Post by jpk »

gamblor956 wrote: post #60
jpk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leading with an accusation of substance abuse isn't civil or productive. Your comment may well be factually correct, but your tone here is inappropriate. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not an accusation of drug use. "What are you smoking" is a US colloquialism that means that one's statement is so nonsensical that the most logical explanation is that the speaker was smoking marijuana at the time the statement was made (because the implied alternative is that the speaker is crazy or quite daft).

I am well aware of the colloquialism. My point is that it violates the site's comment guidelines.

'When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."'

This comment can be shortened to eliminate the first sentence, which is needlessly rude.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#120

Post by BoysenberryPi »

green7ea wrote: post #40
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has the worst open source drivers for Linux. Pretty sure Ryzen APUs still aren't even properly supported. I would love to use AMD on everything, truly would. They are the best for a tight budget but the support just isn't there.

I'm using first gen ryzen with an RX560 with different Linux distros (Ubuntu, arch and void) and it works great. Especially for compiling and gaming.

I'm talking about the APUs using integrated graphics. If you are using an APU with a discrete graphics card you defeat the purpose of buying an APU.
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