VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA • Hacker News Board

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#41

Post by varelse » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

jitl wrote: post #11

nightowl_games wrote: post #4

How does this relate to the goals outlined by George Hotz to bring ML to AMD chips and break the Nvidia dominance? I'm not an expert here but this approach seems powerful and important. But this system seems complex enough to doubt the ability of an individual to build. It seems like this would need a corporate sponsor to get off the ground. Perhaps AMD itself would be interested in paying engineers to iterate on thi…

Holtz is talking about drivers too, not just user space libraries. > The software is terrible! There’s kernel panics in the driver. You have to run a newer kernel than the Ubuntu default to make it remotely stable. I’m still not sure if the driver supports putting two cards in one machine, or if there’s some poorly written global state. When I put the second card in and run an OpenCL program, half the time it kernel…

[dead]

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#42

Post by Narishma » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

derstander wrote: post #31

iforgotpassword wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that wo…

> And that use case is gaming on Windows, which supposedly is the best supported case. I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but the best supported case for AMD is gaming via console: AMD provides CPU/GPU for the current generation of both the XBox and PlayStation consoles. Which suggests to me that they shouldn’t have too much problem supporting their hardware on Windows or Linux. But that’s outside of my area of…

The previous generation as well, and the one before for Xbox 360 and Wii, and the one before for Gamecube.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#43

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #27

iforgotpassword wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that wo…

I've had the opposite experience under Linux. My old nvidia 570's drivers went into severe bitrot. Basic stuff like screensavers and desktops broke badly, and games were flaky. The card is still more than powerful enough for what I used it for. I switched to AMD, with open source drivers. I get windows-level performance on AAA (and indie) games in steam, and zero compatibility issues with the rest of the Linux ecosys…

Yeah, I’ve always bought AMD for this reason since some really bad experiences with Nvidia cards.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#44

Post by amlib » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #27

iforgotpassword wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that wo…

I've had the opposite experience under Linux. My old nvidia 570's drivers went into severe bitrot. Basic stuff like screensavers and desktops broke badly, and games were flaky. The card is still more than powerful enough for what I used it for. I switched to AMD, with open source drivers. I get windows-level performance on AAA (and indie) games in steam, and zero compatibility issues with the rest of the Linux ecosys…

AMD GPU support in linux is a bit of a flip flop. Some generations seem to get a lot of love and work really damn well (sometimes with better and broader support than the windows drivers) like RDNA2 and most Polaris cards. Others such as Vega and specially now RDNA3 are a shitshow with a lot of things just broken.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#45

Post by panzi » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

There needs to be a 3rd implementation called SHUDA.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#46

Post by RicoElectrico » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:08 PM UTC

fancyfredbot wrote: post #17

It's not an implementation of CUDA, it's an implementation of the CUDA runtime API. The API is used to configure the card, allocate and copy memory, and run kernels. Importantly you cannot use this to write the actual kernels which run on the GPU!

So what is this useful for, then?

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#47

Post by aseipp » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #27

iforgotpassword wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that wo…

I've had the opposite experience under Linux. My old nvidia 570's drivers went into severe bitrot. Basic stuff like screensavers and desktops broke badly, and games were flaky. The card is still more than powerful enough for what I used it for. I switched to AMD, with open source drivers. I get windows-level performance on AAA (and indie) games in steam, and zero compatibility issues with the rest of the Linux ecosys…

It really depends on the card. I have an old RDNA workstation card in my server and the driver was a real crapshoot. I eventually started delaying updates to newer kernel releases (which would fix other bugs!) because there would be regressions of various kinds. Graphics under Linux is still a bit painful after all these years.

At least Nvidia finally open sourced their driver too, I guess. And Intel is still open source. But it still sucks a bit I think unless you do research.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#48

Post by izacus » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:52 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #27

iforgotpassword wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that wo…

I've had the opposite experience under Linux. My old nvidia 570's drivers went into severe bitrot. Basic stuff like screensavers and desktops broke badly, and games were flaky. The card is still more than powerful enough for what I used it for. I switched to AMD, with open source drivers. I get windows-level performance on AAA (and indie) games in steam, and zero compatibility issues with the rest of the Linux ecosys…

Why are you talking about screensavers in a CUDA thread though? You can't compute on a fancy screensaver animation, you need a working CUDA driver that nVidia provides for that.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#49

Post by bornfreddy » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

netheril96 wrote: post #30

Just in case other people who have AMD GPU and run Windows have the same needs as I have, that is, to train or run machine learning models, please checkout torch-directml and tensorflow-directml.

Does that work? I might be in market for a new GPU if AMD had something that beats NVidia for ML (for sane price)... I can't really justify buying NVidia GPU, anything decent is too expensive.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#50

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

fancyfredbot wrote: post #17

It's not an implementation of CUDA, it's an implementation of the CUDA runtime API. The API is used to configure the card, allocate and copy memory, and run kernels. Importantly you cannot use this to write the actual kernels which run on the GPU!

Additionally, any wannabe CUDA replacement needs to support PTX and polyglot development, or is a non starter for lots of workloads.