Drivers & Software

[Aerpoweron]

I would like to set another power limit then the stock 250W on the Radeon Pro VII.
But the driver (Pro or normal one) only give you Fan tuning options. After some forth and back with the AMD support i get that you want stability. So no voltage control i can accept. 

All the usual GPU tools (MSI Afterburner, More Power tool and others) just don't work or even recognize the card.  On linux it looked like the Radeon Pro VII is missing the entries in the bios to make any tuning possible.

I think i would need a new Bios for the card (with the tuning features enabled) and a driver that can access them. 

I don't know if anybody can help me. But with the power prices in Germany currently at 40c per kwh i need to do something.

Best outcome would be i get a driver where i can power limit the card down from 250W to 125W. I am pretty sure i can be done, even if i need to flash a bios on that card.

How could i convince the AMD support to make this for me?

[elstaci]

AMD Moderator of Professional GPU @fsadough can probably explain if you can do that or not on your GPU VII Pro card.

[Aerpoweron]

how do i contact this person?

[elstaci]

FSA DOUGH will reply to this thread.

[fsadough]

This feature is limited to Gaming GPUs. I wonder what kind of applications are you going to run with your Radeon Pro VII. 

[Aerpoweron]

I am running Milkyway@home. A distributed computing project which uses the Boinc client.
Milkyway@home is doing N-body simulations for star movements in our galaxy.

I wouldn't ask for a power limitter if the power prices in Germany weren't insanely high. We are the country with the most expensive electricity at the moment i think.
For now the GPU itself runs at 180 to 190W. Adding roughly 20% of Conversion losses and other devices on the GPU to it, that gives me around 216 to 228W Power draw.
If i could cut that down a lot by only loosing some performance that would be nice.
The Normal Radeon VII can do 80% Performance at half the power draw, which i find impressive. But it lacks the FP64 performance.

Do you have any information how this feature is implemented, or what is missing on the Pro cards?

[Anton_R]

In Linux, it is possible to use rocm-smi program, e.g., version 4.0.0. You don't have to install full ROCm, this is just a python script to edit some configuration. Alternatively, you can do it manually in /sys filesystem (you can list the available states by just reading the said files). Here is what I suggest; you have to be root for all this:

maximum power efficiency: choose core clock 860MHz and mem clock 800MHz by (you can omit --device=0 if you have just one AMD card)

rocm-smi --device=0 --setsclk 1
rocm-smi --setmclk 1

or manually by

echo 1 >/sys/class/drm/card0/device/pp_dpm_sclk
echo 1 >/sys/class/drm/card0/device/pp_dpm_mclk

More computing power, with slightly reduced power efficiency (by ca. 10%), can be obtained by using core clock 1153MHz and mem clock 1000MHz:

rocm-smi --setsclk 2
rocm-smi --setmclk 2

or manually by

echo 2 >/sys/class/drm/card0/device/pp_dpm_sclk
echo 2 >/sys/class/drm/card0/device/pp_dpm_mclk

You will probably want to set a fixed fan speed as well, probably based on the temperatures as listed by the second command:

rocm-smi --setfan 96
rocm-smi -t

Unfortunately, it is not possible to do undervolting or overclocking. This was possible, e.g., for Vega Frontier Edition (a kind of "Pro" card) by editing the binary file pp_table (quite a tricky stuff; the undervolting is performed by tuning the socclk states), but here it doesn't work - the corresponding entries are zeroed.

In Windows, I was not able to tune anything in the Pro drivers neither for Radeon Pro VII nor Vega FE. But I'm not much experienced in Windows.

[Anton_R]

By the way, I forgot to mention that if you don't use rocm-smi, but just use the manual sysfs interface in Linux, you will first need to run this:

echo manual > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level

Also, I found out that in Windows, when you want to replace the graphics card (at least this was my experience with Vege FE → Radeon Pro VII switch), you will need to uninstall the driver first, even if the same driver supports the new card as well, otherwise you will end up with constantly freezing system where the driver is almost impossible to uninstall (I needed to return the old card in order to uninstall it).