Thursday, November 11th 2021
AMD ROCm 4.5 Drops "Polaris" Architecture Support
AMD's ROCm compute programming platform—a competitor to NVIDIA's CUDA, dropped support for the "Polaris" graphics architecture, with the latest version 4.5 update. Users on the official ROCm git raised this as an issue assuming it was a bug, to which an official AMD support handle confirmed that the Radeon RX 480 graphics card of the original poster is no longer supported. Another user tested his "Polaris 20" based RX 570, and it isn't supported, either. It's conceivable that the "Polaris 30" based RX 590, a GPU launched in November 2018, isn't supported either. Cutting out a 3-year old graphics architecture from the compute platform sends the wrong message, especially to CUDA users who AMD wants to win over with ROCm. With contemporary GPUs priced out of reach, IT students are left with used older-generation graphics cards, such as those based on "Polaris." NVIDIA CUDA supports GPUs as far back as "Maxwell" (September 2014).
Source:
boxerab (Github)
52 Comments on AMD ROCm 4.5 Drops "Polaris" Architecture Support
That being said, while all corporations are notoriously hard to petition to reverse course, AMD has done it in the past, and if there's enough grumbling among the users of ROCm, it's a possibility that they may bring back support for Polaris.
goes to show what a scam the rx580 / rx590 respin of that ancient rx 480 was...
posts a user who owns actually one asrock rx590 "rape my ears" dual 60mm fans edition... oc pfff does not want a single mhz.
( which now have been massive modified not to sound like a jet engine strapped two 120mm fans to it with high rpm just to quiet it down)
2D no fans / 3D Fan 100% problem solved
But the truth is they're locked in a vicious circle, their compute efforts are behind and these moves only serve to further alienate prospective users. Worse even, they do include the silicon for a capable compute GPU. But they sabotage all that in software.
In all honesty, OpenCL isn't making them any favors either.
Normally, it's best practice to declare those things in advances so that people can prepare. Amateurish move by AMD
Then again, this is the same AMD that didnt want to support their 300 and 400 series chipsets for ryzen 3000 or 5000, wanted OEMS to compile their GPU drivers for mobile ryzen, had to be bullied into investigating rDNA's clocking issues, raised the prices of vega after reviews came out, dropped evergreend river support years before their nvidia counterparts, had to be bullied into admitting that the black screen issue still affects several of their product lines, abandoned radeon VII drivers for almost half a year, and dropped 7000/200/300 series support in the middle of a massive card shortage (arguably a justified act, but terrible PR, and included much newer products like the fury cards). We all should expect AMD to act like this. AMD made record profits in 2019, then again in 2020, then again in 2021. That excuse doesnt fly anymore. People wuote AMD's budget all the time, yet fail to mention that AMD also has less people to pay, less fluff to push and support, and doesnt have the mass of software engineers to pay like intel and nvidia do. And the support is already coded in. Maintaining it is nowhere near as expensive as building out new support.
So GCN is really old.
The line with Polaris 11 should obviously say RX 460/560. So it's seems not fully supported, but it runs on Polaris 11/12, on the other hand it's not supported and doesn't run on Polaris 10? Doesn't really make sense ...
Also their rep ROCmSupport also doesn't know why it isn't working anymore so it might be a bug ...
ROCm is something completely irrelevant to regular consumers and I bet 90% of people posting these comments don't even know what this is. What are you all exactly mad at ?
This kind of thing is egg on both consumer's face and AMD's face.
My bigger complaint is that AMD makes this way too hard on Linux. I’m not a Linux pro, but I’m not exactly an idiot either. I followed the ROCm install steps and it always gave me some sort of reason it couldn’t install when I had a 5700G. Even with the AMDGPU drivers, you have to amend the Ubuntu installer to work on PopOS. I finally got to the place where I could install AMDGPU with some consistency! With Intel, you enter one command and OpenCL support is added.
Once i bought an GTS250 with a single 90mm fan by ASUS and it sell much more cards than AsRock, and even on idle it seem an F-14 at full power while all other GTS250/9800GTX are quite silent but cannot blame nvidia for this.
On youtube "The Good Old Gamer" review rx480 in 2020 and he say it's still great cards and with driver update it become even better.