[TPU] AMD ROCm 4.5 Drops “Polaris” Architecture Support

I guess they ran into even more problems with polaris cards generally, while trying to fix and add the RX480 back to ROCm.
Probably would take too much time, effort and money.

This sucks. I was kind of expecting them to actually get my card back to the ROCm but then this happens...

Probably nobody knows how Polaris ROCm and drivers work at this point, so they chose the easy way out in removing support, I've seen issues with Polaris cards that are years old at this point on the AMDGPU driver. They just don't care even though Polaris cards are still sold as new, really all GPU vendors are extremely scummy these days...

So far I have found no indication that we removed support - it's looking like a bug resulting from all the build/packaging/install changes we made in 4.5.

money

This means dropping a card as new as 3 years old…

Worst time to do it aswell

Due to HW limitations it can't run ROCm properly, so when it previously was listed as supported it was a buggy mess.

This is exactly my situation. I had a lot of issues with rx480 in blender and most of the time it was because of driver bugs and generally poor support. ROCm was promised to fix the situation and now that Blender 3.0 dropped opencl I'm stuck with a card that can't render anything.

And it's not like I can buy anything else right now for obvious reasons.

I saw on Blender's roadmap that they are working towards implementing Vulkan, so that could potentially serve as a replacement for OpenCL.

EDIT: I read further and see now that HIP is the current replacement they've chosen for OpenCL. Not sure what they'll do with Vulkan, but it would be useful for supporting Nvidia, AMD, and Intel under a single API.

Well, OpenCL has been taken out of Blender as of 3.0. Apparently AMD cards are going to use something new, called HIP. However if AMD is dropping support for that GPU generation in ROCM, that does not bode well.

I've done some searching around online but I can't find much about how this will work. What GPU generations will be supported by HIP? Apparently AMD is pushing to incorporate some sort of GPU-based denoising into Blender (similar to Optix), which is definitely a good thing.

Doing denoising on the GPU speeds up the viewport, even if all the ray tracing is still being done just on the CPU, because it offloads work.

But ideally people on Polaris will not be left out in the cold here.

But AMD are tiny indie hardware hardware developers - how could they possibly support hardware for more than 5-6 minutes?

You buy a new one but you find out that it's buggy. You're supposed to wait until they fix it. Then they decide that they want to rewrite the entire compute stack so you wait some more. And finally when they are supposed to release it they drop support for the card that you have.

Then you buy a new one and the story repeats itself.

bbbut this time it'll be different we swears! -AMD

That’s why Nvidia leads in the space!!! Plug-play is the new way!!!

Consider those RDNA1 cards dropped soon by AMD as they cant do DX12U.

I think RDNA is added as supported in this version. I was able to install ROCm on a 6600 machine, and at least rocm-smi works.

Only the 6900Xt was added... and Polaris being dropped is a just a bug. The whole article here is a nothingburger with no references to any official statement by AMD. And AMD's people in this thread are saying.... guess what its a bug.

ROCm runs only on Linux and what r u describing is the reverse there with Nvidia having garbage drivers vs the AMD open-source ones.

It's not needed on Linux because GPUs based on GCN 1-3 and even older GPUs based on TeraScale still receive driver support.

Linux is the way.

Because its a bug and the article doesn't even provide any references for the assertion that AMD dropped support because they didn't.

This is decidely short-sighted then because Nvidia's CUDA is supported for EVERY GPU they produced during last 6+ years. Just FFS.

I think that AMD can sort CPU support out after it gets ROCm to be good enough. There are some capabilities that are only now being made available which were available for CUDA for years.

I'm sure that NVIDIA has like 100 times the budget for CUDA. I don't really know AMD's plan, but I think that the goal is first to make this viable for server GPUs, as that is often the final target of GPU software.

I do feel that it would have helped AMD and developers who are AMD fans if it would have supported more consumer GPUs and also Windows. Unfortunately even if AMD had a lot more resources, such an endeavour would take time. Still, I think it's something that AMD should strive for.

Nvidia happily supplied free of charge gpu's to those institutes as an investment of their CUDA development. I have never hear AMD doing such a thing.

that's the reason why they have such an extensive library. Good luck AMD.

this isn't a consumer tech

It's very much consumer tech when it inevitably becomes supported (or unsupported) as part of commercial software; We aren't talking about niche subset of the market focused on Machine Learning, we're talking about Premiere, Photoshop, and Solidworks here.

The whole suite of adobe programs is basically an nvidia-only affair unless you prefer slower and buggier software with minimal support from both the hardware vendor and adobe.

AMD doesn’t have to do it, but NVIDIA always has and that’s one of the major reasons they’re ubiquitous and AMD is the off-brand nobody cares about.

It seriously always has been a massive on-ramp to the cuda ecosystem, the other major one being donations to universities / etc to get the hardware into places where students can do research work on it. Those are the people writing the code that drives the next 5-10 years of the market, and even if they don’t, they’re learning the skills they’ll use for the next 10 years. NVIDIA is making it easy to write stuff for their platform while AMD is going out of their way to cut off access.

And like, obviously right now if you wanted to do some ML and you wanted a card to do it, your options are a $5k enterprise card from AMD, or you can do some basic work on a $600 1080 Ti, right? And the full fat option from NVIDIA is the 3090, which is still cheaper than an enterprise card.

It's too late for AMD, CUDA is the standard. And it has a 10 year head start, which is an eternity in computing.

At this point, even Apple has a more consistent GPU compute approach. Which is nuts.

AMD is basically a non-entity in GPGPU at this point. Which is mind blogging.