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joseangel
Journeyman III

ATI OpenCL and Nvidia for video output on Linux

Hi,  I need to setup a computer with the next configuration on Linux:  1 x Nvidia for video output 2 x ATI HD7970 for OpenCL.  How to do it?  Thanks.  Regards,

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12 Replies
settle
Challenger

It's a bit complicated in Linux to do what you want because currently an X screen has to be initiated on both AMD graphics cards in order to get the driver to load and OpenCL to work on them.  That's in addition to the normal X screen for the Nvidia graphics card to use it as the video output.  Might I suggest using a third AMD graphics card for the video output, that way you can more easily work with OpenGL and OpenCL contexts and memory objects.  It's more difficult to do that when you use two different vendor platforms.

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Thanks for your answer, but we need the video output in Nvidia graphics card.  Regards,

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settle
Challenger

One last tip I can give is that the order of driver installation seems to be important.  If I installed the AMD graphics driver and then the Nvidia graphics driver the system wouldn't function properly, but if I installed the Nvidia graphics driver and then the AMD graphics driver the system worked.

I tried a similar setup before (although just one of each graphics cards), but because of the X screen issue I only got the system to work with AMD as the dedicated display and Nvidia as the dedicated compute.

If you get it working well let us know exactly how.

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We tried everything you mentioned.  First installed the AMD driver, and then the Nvidia. It works out, but the AMD with OpenCL.   We are waiting to AMD release the driver 12.5 that has support for X 1.12 and we will try to start a second X server with AMD graphics board (dummy VGA).  I'll keep you informed.  regards,

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Hello!

I'll pass on this information to the driver team.

Cheers!

Kristen

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Kristen,  thank you for your reply.  We had a contact in AMD (Bruno Stefanizzi), we sent him some questions about OpenGL/OpenCL but got no response.  We would like to use your solution and with all graphics AMD (AMD for video output and AMD for OpenCL), it would be easier, but nowdays we need the Nvidia graphics board for video output, this is a real-time environment (Linux and Xenomai) and Nvidia supports 60fps under load and AMD occasionally lost frames.   This is for real products that are under development.  Regards,  jose angel

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joseangel:

Do you mean that you didnt install fglrx or open source radeon and running X from nvidia only?

Because I tried exactly what you are trying to do and found out that loading both nvidia and fglrx drivers to X at the same time is causing segmentation faults. (perhaps different instances of X could help... I did not try that).

Kristen:

1- You should get the driver team to make a driver which does not require X to be running for executing OpenCL code. I am pretty sure it is possible since Nvidia already supports this.

2- The driver team should come up with a solution for resetting the card without rebooting the machine in the case if card locks up. Again, I am pretty sure this is possible since I am able to just press ctrl-c to cancel program execution on Nvidia cards even with programs which should cause deadlocks.

These are the most important features that I can think of which are missing from AMD's Radeon drivers, at least if you want to run them in a cluster in a  high performance computing environment.

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Great! I've sent this conversation to the Catalyst Product Manager.

Thanks so much for your feedback!

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Hi,  for video output, X server 1.12 Nvidia 295.53 (only) for OpenCL, AMD fglrx 12.4 (a second server X, crash for now)  Regards,

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afroja86
Journeyman III

I tried a similar setup before (although just one of each graphics cards), but because of the X screen issue I only got the system to work with AMD as the dedicated display and Nvidia as the dedicated compute.

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I have done that too, as long as radeon is running the X, you can have multiple nvidia cards because nvidia does not depend on X running.. (I had 1 radeon 3 nvidia)

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For us, the interesting thing is to use AMD as the dedicated compute (AMD 79xx surpass NVIDIA 690/680).  Regards,

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