Wednesday, August 16th 2017

AMD Releases Beta Driver Specifically Geared for Blockchain Compute

Paraphrasing our own VSG, "So, this happened". AMD has gone out and done it: they've released a Beta driver specifically geared towards blockchain-based workloads, which should improve the company's GPU performance in generating money for miners. The driver is compatible with close to the entirety of AMD's GCN lineup - all the way from hot-from-the-foundry Vega to AMD's HD 7900 series. As AMD puts it, this is a driver solely purposed towards blockchain workloads - no gaming or graphics workloads (read, what graphics cards were originally meant to do) are officially supported in this release.

Apparently, AMD took it upon themselves to release this driver due to AMD's well documented DAG performance decrease for Ethereum mining hashrates. Specifically, according to Legit Reviews, the Radeon RX 480 went from an expected 14.8 MH/s at DAG #199 (down from 24.6 MH/s at DAG #130) to a prospective 24.8 MH/s DAG #199 performance according to Claymore's benchmark script. Performance improvements from the non-blockchain-geared driver release seem to stand at around 10-15%, which isn't too shabby from a single, Beta driver release.
This move from AMD could open up a proverbial can of worms, however, in the sense that it may start to look like AMD's focus isn't on gaming anymore. This makes sense - the only focus of any company is to make money - so the fact that AMD is tapping the mining market with increased, more predictable performance and longevity isn't strange. This is especially true if one considers Vega's current positioning against NVIDIA's parts, if current pricing trends remain. This move from the company, while sensible from an economic perspective - a graphics card sold is a graphics card sold, period - may bring the company some pushback from gamers, who simply want to be able to purchase AMD's graphics cards for their historically-intended purpose - gaming. That is already hard to do - nigh impossible - at MSRP prices for AMD's most recent architectures. And Vega seems to be going down the same road.

You can download AMD's blockchain-geared driver here.
Sources: Legit Reviews, Hot Hardware
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76 Comments on AMD Releases Beta Driver Specifically Geared for Blockchain Compute

#76
r9
AMD doing good its in everybody's interest period.
Just look how Athlonxp, Athlon64 x2 and Threadripper pushed Intel.
With out AMD we would have still be using Pentium4s.
Everybody benefits from competition.
And me personally I'm a Amd fan but when I buy stuff price/performance is king.
Don't care what nanometer the GPU is, how many shaders, what type of memory etc.
FPS is what I care about.
A lot of times you can find an angle to justify a product.
But for Vega I don't think there is a good angle.
The GPU is huge, expensive to produce and power hungry.
HMB2 also expensive and one of the biggest factors why Vega is late. And I'm not sure if offers any real benefit compared to GDDR5X. Alsowider memory bus increases the price of the PCB.
Amd needs to make the same leap as FX to Ryzen to be competitive.
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