AMD Clarifies Radeon VII Pro Driver Support: No WS Certifications

[btarunr]

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.

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."

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[btarunr]

Monday's good news (Radeon Pro certifications) followed up with Tuesday's bad news (this), and Monday's bad news (no Radeon VII UEFI support) with Tuesday's good news (one-click BIOS updater).

 

[xkm1948]

So it is still a gaming card? Man this card has identity confusions..

 

[Vayra86]

So it is still a gaming card? Man this card has identity confusions..

Sounds like good old GCN to me

 

[xkm1948]

Sounds like good old GCN to me

Man GCN really need to be put in museum now.

 

[I No]

AMD's like "Fam we got this new GPU but we have no idea at which market it should be aimed. S'allright, release it first, we can worry about that later". No wonder the Lisa Su's keynote was such a snore-fest when it came to Radeon 7. RTG trying to be the jack of all trades since forever. Sad.

 

[Zubasa]

Man GCN really need to be put in museum now.

Knowing that GCN stands for Graphics Core Next makes it rather ironic.
It has stuck around long enough that they might as well rename it to Graphics Core Past.

 

[FPSPusher]

Knowing that GCN stands for Graphics Core Next makes it rather ironic.
It has stuck around long enough that they might as well rename it to Graphics Core Past.

I wish there was a thumbs up button to like your comment.

 

[JB_Gamer]

Nevertheless, Amd still manage to produce some quite competent products with this GCN.

 

[Deleted member 158293]

For your own sake whoever is in charge of Marketing at AMD... please get your stories straight before issuing anything, the internet echo chamber has especially had a lot of distortion lately...

 

[Vayra86]

Knowing that GCN stands for Graphics Core Next makes it rather ironic.
It has stuck around long enough that they might as well rename it to Graphics Core Past.

No no, you misunderstand.

Its 'Graphics Core'

NEXT!

I wish there was a thumbs up button to like your comment.

There is a like button for that, even comes with free thumb

 

[Xzibit]

For your own sake whoever is in charge of Marketing at AMD... please get your stories straight before issuing anything, the internet echo chamber has especially had a lot of distortion lately...

Its the people in the tech press that don't bother to verify the story (stories) in general in favor of traffic/revenue. No self accountability and no oversight.

 

[Deleted member 158293]

Its the people in the tech press that don't bother to verify the story (stories) in general in favor of traffic/revenue. No self accountability and no oversight.

Unfortunately very true, the profit in news is certainly not the story's validity anymore...

 

[notb]

Monday's good news (Radeon Pro certifications) followed up with Tuesday's bad news (this), and Monday's bad news (no Radeon VII UEFI support) with Tuesday's good news (one-click BIOS updater).

Actually, it's a promise of a one-click BIOS updater.
How long will it take them to deliver?

 

[Xaled]

They think there are no enough money in the gaming field, so they just want to sell this card to someone who maybe willing to pay! just like miners!!

 

[XXL_AI]

ah.. remember the times amd fanboys was enjoying nvidia's ban on geforce & titan usage on servers.. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpus/
look who is laughing now
amd is the new nvidia
nvidia is the new intel
intel is always chipzilla

 

[notb]

ah.. remember the times amd fanboys was enjoying nvidia's ban on geforce & titan usage on servers.. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpus/
look who is laughing now
amd is the new nvidia
nvidia is the new intel
intel is always chipzilla

Different situation.

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).

 

[XXL_AI]

Different situation.

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).

No certifications also means "no stable operation".

 

[John Naylor]

nVidia does not provide support for AutoDesk products despite the fact that GTX cards have delivered performance 99.5% of their flagship Quadro cards ($4k) in 2D CAD and exceeded the Quadro cards in 3D CAD. Best part was Engineers, Architects and CAD Operators can buy the top of the line gaming card for use and even their entire home box and write it off on their taxes .... I'm told many can't do that anymore with new tax code.

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.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/auto...s-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.

 

[notb]

nVidia does not provide support for AutoDesk products despite the fact that GTX cards have delivered performance 99.5% of their flagship Quadro cards ($4k) in 2D CAD and exceeded the Quadro cards in 3D CAD.

I don't understand this sentence. I mean: it is true, but are surprised or what? Quadro cards are not about performance.

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.

AMD is doing the exact same thing. And it's not exclusive to graphic cards or even electronics.

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).

 

[Wask]

i work with Autodesk Revit, Navisworks and some 3dsmax rendering, none of this software is optimised for the pro driver and for BIM it doesn't really need to be certified as nothing is mission critical. So the added stability of the pro driver can only be a bonus in my world.