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mrtom1999
Journeyman III

Video Card for Linux

I am using Ubuntu 12.04, and I recently tried OpenCL and PyOpenCL on GTX 680, HD 7790 and HD 7870 XT. The Nvidia linux driver for GTX 680 works, but slowly (cannot run at full clock). The AMD driver for HD 7790 is extremely slow when compiling kernels, and even returns segmentation faults for some kernels. Last, HD 7870 XT does not even have an official linux driver. It seems Windows OS has none of these issues. Are these video cards too new to be well supported on Linux? Which video card do you suggest to be used on Linux? Thanks.

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12 Replies
himanshu_gautam
Grandmaster

The AMD GPUs 7790 and 7870 XT are good to be used for OpenCL development.

AFAIK, driver for 7970 should also work for 7870 XT. Can you confirm, that driver is not working for you?

I do agree that windows has been higher priority, and there might be issues which are only present in linux. But AMD is very much committed to make the linux drivers as stable as possible too. If you can share some code that takes huge amount of compilation time or seg faults, i would be happy to study it, and report it to relevant engineering team.

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For HD 7790, I tried the following drivers:

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/RadeonHD7790CatalystPerformanceDriver.aspx

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx

The benchmark.py provided by PyOpenCL is sufficient to demonstrate that the compilation is extremely slower the usual. This issue was also previously reported here: http://devgurus.amd.com/thread/160362.

BTW, I normally run eight PyOpenCL programs concurrently to fully utilize the GPU, which has no problem with HD 5750 and GTX 680 but causes HD 7790 unresponsive.

For HD 7870 XT, I tried the second driver above, which returned an error message saying my video card is not supported, and thus the installation cannot be continued.

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Hi,

It might take me some time to PyOpenCL. It will be helpful if you can tell any any SDK Sample (or give some C++ code instead), to check for unusual compiler times.

Are you trying to create a system with NV + AMD cards together?

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I See. Unfortunately, all my OpenCL codes are wrapped by PyOpenCL, NumPy and BioPython.

BTW, I have two computers: one as a desktop and one as a workstation.

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Maybe you can point me to a simple PyOpenCL example. It might also be that the PyOpenCL wrapper itself is taking huge time, So you can check the compilation time using CodeXL. Just try running some APP SDK Samples and try comparing their build times with your PyOpenCL sample's build time.

About driver issues, I was interested if you are trying to install multiple OpenCL implementations like Intel + AMD + NVIDIA.

You can try this link to cleanup your system from previous installations: http://askubuntu.com/questions/78675/how-do-i-remove-the-fglrx-drivers-after-ive-installed-them-by-h...

There are several examples under the example folder of PyOpenCL package.

For the segmentation fault issue, it is probably because the following driver does not support HD 7790, though it is not stated on the website: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx

As stated early that I normally run eight PyOpenCL programs concurrently to fully utilize the GPU, which has no problem with HD 5750 and GTX 680 but causes HD 7790 unresponsive. Today, I found the same problem with FirePro V9800 (on a remote workstation).

BTW, I did remove old driver, or sometimes even reinstall Linux, before installing new drivers.

Thanks a lot for your help.

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i have a 7870 Myst Tahiti LE and can confirm the drivers do not detect the card

doing aticonfig --list-adapters i can only see my 6950

I am running Lubuntu 13.10

Same issue for me, i'm using this card :

Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 XT, 2Go

i have installed via package manager the 13.4 version :

aticonfig: No supported adapters detected

but i have finally sucess to launch Xorg (but with very poor performance, like glxgears is very slow, opencl is not active & i have a watermark : hardware not supported ... )

& if i launch (also try a clean other version installed) the drivers from amd site ( amd-catalyst-13.4-linux-x86.x86_64.run )

it's crash : Your graphics adapter is not supported by this driver. Installation will not proceed

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I am experiencing the exact same issue reported by gaby_64.

I have a dual graphics card setup - Powercolor 7870 Myst Tahiti LE alongside an Sapphire HD 6850. I installed Catalyst 13.4 via a package build for Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS.  Only the HD 6850 is detected with aticonfig --lsa. It is very disappointing to buy a new card only to discover I can't run it properly in Linux. I hope AMD will fix this soon.

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tomaszkane
Journeyman III

I'm also waiting for driver to that card - Radeon HD 7870 XT.

My Kubuntu is almost unusable,

Right Mouse Click in Firefox == freeze,

start Krusader == freeze,

open file dialog in Kate == half minute waiting...

WiFi was gone...

any many other issues who appear when I change graphic card...

My last graphic - Radeon HD 4980 works perfect.

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roumano
Journeyman III

Hi,

Working much better with the new version available (13.6_beta) :

atconfig is working, opencl is working.

I just have some freeze on special use case (like poweron the computer & doing nothing for 30 minutes without turning on the display)

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Thanks for the update

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