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AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
21–30 of 160 posts
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#22They aren't going to win anything until they fix their laughably bad drivers and keep them fixed. I have several Ryzens, but there's no way I'd go anywhere near their graphics cards.
Agree, I dropped Linux due bad graphics drivers (AMD)
Are you really saying that AMD is worse than Nvidia on Linux???
I have a Nvidia GPU (on my laptop), and I've had a truly horrible experience on Linux with Nvidia proprietary drivers. I was actually considering ditching my laptop, and buying a new one with AMD chipsets, due to the issues I've had on Linux due to the presence of the Nvidia graphics card. I occasionally play games on my Linux laptop, using Proton (a Steam derivative of Wine), as well as native Linux games. So I do want a GPU. (Although, at this point I've even considered getting a laptop with no GPU and only integrated Intel graphics, since I want to at least be able to do business/work without problems.)
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#23Their software things (drivers, compilers, apis) are laughable.
I would add libraries to that list (cuda equivalent).
OpenCL is all you need, and for the sake of a healthy (read: non-monopoly) GPU computing ecosystem you must insist on good OpenCL support! Having an additional CUDA backend is fine if you want, but AMD GPUs are often really strong in a level playing field, which is exactly what you want as a consumer. Basically no consumer ever benefitted from a monopoly, and GPU computing is very important.
I've developed (as lead GPU dev in a 3-man team) two successful rendering applications with OpenCL on all 3 desktop platforms, it's not some kind of impossible task. More developers just have to stick their necks out and do it.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#24And when that day comes, I will buy it. But for now I will go with nVidia. Also I badly need same CUDA codebase/documentation on AMD part as well to make such a move. ML is such a breeze when you throw CUDA at it these days.
I am stiiiill mostly reading/researching but I'm pretty sure that CUDA is crucial and OpenCL just won't cut it for ML.
That said, AMD had a CUDA clone/conversion system a while back. I'm not sure where that's gone.
The ideal would be to leapfrog CUDA and present something more usable and straightforward, especially something where the memory and threading model is really clear. CUDA already seem pretty good but there's always room for improvement.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#25Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would add libraries to that list (cuda equivalent).
OpenCL is all you need, and for the sake of a healthy (read: non-monopoly) GPU computing ecosystem you must insist on good OpenCL support! Having an additional CUDA backend is fine if you want, but AMD GPUs are often really strong in a level playing field, which is exactly what you want as a consumer. Basically no consumer ever benefitted from a monopoly, and GPU computing is very important. I've developed (as lead G…
It's not, though. The blas and fft libraries are not only much slower (less efficient for the claimed peak of the cards), but they're missing features. For example, gemms don't work on complex half precision in any opencl library I've seen. Batched modes are missing for some types, etc. For basic operations, they're sufficient. But it's hard to get behind libraries that AMD doesn't really control.
The ship has sailed on opencl for Nvidia. It's not going to happen, and it's not worth holding out hope. At this point, cuda has improved at a much faster rate, and the support is much higher. It's just not worth building a new scientific computing product around opencl, since it's as portable as cuda at this point if Nvidia doesn't support it.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#27And when that day comes, I will buy it. But for now I will go with nVidia. Also I badly need same CUDA codebase/documentation on AMD part as well to make such a move. ML is such a breeze when you throw CUDA at it these days.
I am stiiiill mostly reading/researching but I'm pretty sure that CUDA is crucial and OpenCL just won't cut it for ML. That said, AMD had a CUDA clone/conversion system a while back. I'm not sure where that's gone. The ideal would be to leapfrog CUDA and present something more usable and straightforward, especially something where the memory and threading model is really clear. CUDA already seem pretty good but there…
well, there is SYCL
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#28I'm working in ML with NVIDIA, T4, v100, P100 GPUs, taking advantage of the integration with TensorFlow, specifically mixed precision, TensorCores and TensorRT, would like to see those levels of integration with AMD to start considering in our Infrastructure
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm running an RX 570 on Linux and it works fine for my purposes (work, Steam games & Blizzard games under wine).
Same with a 580. Linux, many monitors, work, light gaming. Drivers are the first time I've ever not had issues with Linux graphics. Three years in I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Where are the driver issues? I'm certain it was like a law of physics in Linux, but somehow, not this time, not for me?
I have 2x 24" monitors on Ubuntu 18.04.03 with a Radeon RX 580
I can't watch a video on Youtube without substantial tearing on Firefox or Chrome. I've followed close to 20 guides and tried a number of drivers which all fail provide any benefit.
Running glxgears will run at 7400FPS, with minor tearing. My monitors don't have FreeSync or whatever it's called since they're pretty old (over 10 years).
Since most guides are as helpful as "type this into a console" - I haven't learnt anything while trying these fixes.
edit: I tried to install the newest drivers (19.50), and they fail to install with build errors
since I had to uninstall the old ones (19.20) I'm now running Polaris10? drivers by accident, and the tearing issue seems to have disappeared. I have no idea if these are less performant, but they are sufficient for my needs.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#30The big problem right now is that ROCm, AMD's equivalent to Cuda for deep learning, is not supported for the consumer Radeon Navi cards. I had hoped it would be supported in ROCm 3.0 when that was released - but there has been no official word, which is worrying. If AMD are to compete in the GPU/DeepLearning space, it will be because they have hardware that is competitive (not even as good as Nvidia), low cost, and doesn't have the same EULA licensing restrictions as Nvidia. Could you imagine taking your TensorFlow program on AWS and just running the same code on a AMD GPU, but costing 25% of a V100 (with 80% of the performance)? That is where they should be. And the "run unchanged TensorFlow program" is not actually a problem - ROCm has been upstreamed into TensorFlow. It is support for their own Navi GPUs that is the software problem right now!