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Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

arstechnica.com

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Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#11

Post by zozbot234 »

jagger27 wrote: post #9
saulrh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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 l…

Isn'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)

> 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.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#12

Post by wnevets »

cammikebrown wrote: post #6
Tenoke wrote: post #2

Good 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.

My 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.

What FPS do you consider "great"?

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#13

Post by sudosysgen »

snicker7 wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#15

Post by rolleiflex »

sudosysgen wrote: post #13
snicker7 wrote: post #10

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.

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.

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.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#16

Post by yob22 »

narrator wrote: post #7
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RX 6500 XT is a worse card than the RX480 released 5 years ago https://i.redd.it/oyxyoxmch2a81.jpg .

This is kind of like Google and Youtube becoming worse because they have too many of the wrong kinds of users.

No post body was provided.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#18

Post by sudosysgen »

rolleiflex wrote: post #15
sudosysgen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 dir…

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.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#20

Post by [deleted] »

Tenoke wrote: post #2

Good 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.

[deleted]
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