Tuesday, February 12th 2019
AMD Clarifies Radeon VII Pro Driver Support: No WS Certifications
Monday we were treated to news we felt was too good to be true at the back of our minds, that AMD is adding a host of Radeon Pro features to its flagship client-segment Radeon VII graphics card, by enabling support in its upcoming Pro 19.Q1 drivers. The company today released a clarification on the matter, and explained that while it's true that some Radeon Pro features are being enabled, such as enterprise-grade security, standard feature-set, and Pro-grade driver stability; key features such as 3D application certifications and optimizations are being excluded. These would be the features you pay top-Dollar to buy Radeon Pro or competing NVIDIA Quadro products for. The drivers also lack enterprise remote workstation features.
AMD clarified the reasoning behind this partial Radeon Pro driver support that's along the lines of its Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition feature-set: to enable businesses to use both Radeon Pro and client-segment Radeon VII products across their infrastructure. They could, in theory, have a workstation set up with a Radeon Pro graphics card to satisfy application certification, and render some of their workloads on a Radeon VII installed on the same machine.
The full AMD statement on the matter follows.
Source:
TrueMantle (Reddit)
AMD clarified the reasoning behind this partial Radeon Pro driver support that's along the lines of its Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition feature-set: to enable businesses to use both Radeon Pro and client-segment Radeon VII products across their infrastructure. They could, in theory, have a workstation set up with a Radeon Pro graphics card to satisfy application certification, and render some of their workloads on a Radeon VII installed on the same machine.
AMD provides the same driver support to Radeon VII that is available on other Radeon consumer hardware as listed in the table below. To be specific, workstation performance, application certifications, and features do not apply to Radeon consumer hardware when using Radeon Pro Software. The explicit purpose of our "One Driver" program is to simplify implementation for businesses that use Radeon consumer and Radeon Pro products across their install base."
20 Comments on AMD Clarifies Radeon VII Pro Driver Support: No WS Certifications
It has stuck around long enough that they might as well rename it to Graphics Core Past.
Its 'Graphics Core'
NEXT!There is a like button for that, even comes with free thumb ;)
How long will it take them to deliver?
look who is laughing now :)
amd is the new nvidia
nvidia is the new intel
intel is always chipzilla
Nvidia's case was a legal issue around copyright law with some interesting questions.
For example: if you own a GPU, do you also own the BIOS that was installed at the factory? No, you don't. It's a hard pill to swallow for many.
AMD's case is a simple issue of certification.
Even if your card is not certified by e.g. Autodesk, you can still use it (for commercial purposes as well), but you're adviced not to.
Autodesk doesn't guarantee it will work properly (support all features and return correct results).
nVidia is just using the certification thing as a means not to have to provide support for CAD ... well if ya want support, buy or card that costs 4 to 8 times as much. Of course for rendering, animation and modeling GTX won't cut it if in production environment.
As for stability, like the rest of my profession, ... been using GTX cards in our engineering office exclusively since the 1st one came out (Diamond Viper's) before that. We don't need modeling or rendering but for those that do, would ltypically have 10 or more GTX based workstations for every Quadro box. I was once asked to take a peek at a colleagues 1 year old desktop (Quadro) ..... he had said it wasn't any faster than his old machine and "he expected more", Using the cadalyst benchmark ... my 6 month old GTX based laptop was faster. However it came down to his subjective impression when staring at the screen after each operation. I asked him to just work at his normal speed w/o watching the screen. In no case over the next few minutes was he waiting for a task to complete. The machine was always ready by the time he made his next key stroke.
forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-electrical-forum/why-don-t-autocad-focus-on-multicore-processor-support/td-p/7286313
Back in the day, late 90s I can remember paying $1,000 for a SCSI 1 GB HD because the speed made a difference. Today, any action in AutoCAD 2D and 3D is instantaneous. One of the reasons it's never been optimized for more cores is it does fine using just one (2 threads via HT) . Some tasks are offloaded to other cores such as AutoLISP interpreter but no matter what CPU is in the machine, we see no observable difference.
In pretty much every business you have some "certifications" for tools or equipment. Sometimes you're forced to buy them (like safety gear). Sometimes not. But it's usually worth it.
Yes, you can run Autodesk programs on any GPU. Imagine you're a freelance engineer and your PC makes an error in calculations resulting in massive recall of faulty parts. Do you really want to be the person who admits that the GPU wasn't certified by software provider? :-)
And yeah, it doesn't mean every workstation in a company needs an expensive pro-grade hardware. You can develop and test on whatever you want.
But production environment is a different story.
I'm in machine learning. And it's pretty much the same story. You can develop on the cheapest hardware around (I do it on a 1050), but the final model that is used in production is always put through a separate system. In our case it's a local server with a V100 (we're replacing it with cloud now).