Friday, April 14th 2023
AMD Brings ROCm to Consumer GPUs on Windows OS
AMD has published an exciting development for its Radeon Open Compute Ecosystem (ROCm) users today. Now, ROCm is coming to the Windows operating system, and the company has extended ROCm support for consumer graphics cards instead of only supporting professional-grade GPUs. This development milestone is essential for making AMD's GPU family more competent with NVIDIA and its CUDA-accelerated GPUs. For those unaware, AMD ROCm is a software stack designed for GPU programming. Similarly to NVIDIA's CUDA, ROCm is designed for AMD GPUs and was historically limited to Linux-based OSes and GFX9, CDNA, and professional-grade RDNA GPUs.
However, according to documents obtained by Tom's Hardware (which are behind a login wall), AMD has brought support for ROCm to Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6600, and R9 Fury GPU. What is interesting is not the inclusion of RX 6900 XT and RX 6600 but the support for R9 Fury, an eight-year-old graphics card. Also, what is interesting is that out of these three GPUs, only R9 Fury has full ROCm support, the RX 6900 XT has HIP SDK support, and RX 6600 has only HIP runtime support. And to make matters even more complicated, the consumer-grade R9 Fury GPU has full ROCm support only on Linux and not Windows. The reason for this strange selection of support has yet to be discovered. However, it is a step in the right direction, as AMD has yet to enable more functionality on Windows and more consumer GPUs to compete with NVIDIA.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
However, according to documents obtained by Tom's Hardware (which are behind a login wall), AMD has brought support for ROCm to Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6600, and R9 Fury GPU. What is interesting is not the inclusion of RX 6900 XT and RX 6600 but the support for R9 Fury, an eight-year-old graphics card. Also, what is interesting is that out of these three GPUs, only R9 Fury has full ROCm support, the RX 6900 XT has HIP SDK support, and RX 6600 has only HIP runtime support. And to make matters even more complicated, the consumer-grade R9 Fury GPU has full ROCm support only on Linux and not Windows. The reason for this strange selection of support has yet to be discovered. However, it is a step in the right direction, as AMD has yet to enable more functionality on Windows and more consumer GPUs to compete with NVIDIA.
21 Comments on AMD Brings ROCm to Consumer GPUs on Windows OS
"AMD ROCm is a software stack designed for GPU programming. Like CUDA, ROCm is designed for AMD GPUs"
This reads as if CUDA was designed for AMD gpu's
Edit: read the Tom's article, it would seem indeed that only these models are concerned for now. I have a 6900XT so I might play with this at some point, but if I had a 6950XT I would feel betrayed.
However this is excellent news. AMD's "Linux only" position wasn't truly helping them too much, and their CUDA needs to break through, if slowly.
Getting Windows on the grill is great news for all the AI dabblers that hesitated at buying AMD and now should see support start rolling out in the coming years. Nod.ai's Shark already did it with Vulkan, but that's apparently a special approach, we'll see if it gets more common.
ROCm should be pushed into all software that can take compute on Windows and Linux, so I can only say that this is a great first step forward.
Now waiting for the 7000s to get that same support, which considering the containers that have shown up online recently, shouldn't take months yet. They were on release candidate 4 two weeks ago. Even if it's only Linux support at first, I just want to see the things advance.Then the gfx1031 should also work for all rx 6600, 6600 xt, 6650xt I take it?
Not a native speaker here, but it sounds wrong to me, biased at least. Or is ROCm going to be compatible with CUDA? I'm confused.
Marketing is everything these days.
I am honestly surprised they aren't giving this highest priority to compete against NVIDIA because right now they are facing practically zero competition in this space.
HERE I AM
ROCM LIKE A HURRICANE
Not sure why they didn't include the newer RDNA3 GPUs for HIP SDK support. RDNA3 is technically a newer version of RDNA2 with nothing removed, only refined.
Stable Diffusion on Windows, here we come!
I've been blown away with how much faster in Stable Diffusion my 6800 XT is in Linux compared to my GTX 1070 in Windows. 512x512 images take about 2 minutes to generate on the 1070, and only about 30 seconds on the 6800 XT.
I wonder how performance in Windows will compare to Linux.
For many years I've been using Cuda only being limited when an old and underpowered old not-even-gaming card didn't have enough VRAM.
Official support in AMD language is basically that it's been vetted on the same standards as their pro consumers (the datacenters who buy W cards). You can very well run on any of the other cards.
I'm not 100% sure of that though.