PC Drivers & Software

[dpospisi]

Two days ago, I finally "upgraded" from GTX 1070 to RX6800. As a content creator, i need couple of apps running without issues - mainly Blender, Substance and X-Plane.

I was not able to get it working so far. I tried various drivers - amdgpu, amdgpu-pro with various opencl / vulkan stack. Non of them worked.

I think there are two ways to go - provide single closed binary drivers as NVidia does, which works flawlessly out of the box. Or go opensource way as Intel does. Yet, AMD invented it's own approach - something in between. Provide zilion of various drivers and combinations of all of them. Each and single one of them crippled in it's own way. Let each user fiddle with them for each particular usecase just to find out that none of them works as should.

At this point, it seems that OpenCL support for RX 6000 cards is non-existing. I tried different apps with the latest amdgpu-pro driver as well as tried ROC stack but it keeps crashing and crashing.

I just bought useless pice of hardware for $3000. Yet, my 5 years old NVidia card is much better for every task I need. Many thanks.

[colesdav]

You are correct.

[colesdav]

What do you think of the AMD Radeon GUI/UI for your RX6800 GPU in Linux to control basic things like GPU clocks, fan speeds etc?

Since you tired ROCm I assume you are running latest version of Ubuntu?

[dpospisi]

I am not interested in fan control / clock tuning at all.

I was running latest ubuntu, that I downgraded to 21.04 to get amdgpu-pro support. Did not help much.

[colesdav]

I have one PC decked out with multiple Fiji GPUs for ROCm on Ubuntu. 
Spent more time debugging problems with ROCm and driver bugs than actually coding. 

 It is / was mess. 
AMD dropped support for their OpenCL SDK for Windows and there is no OpenCL for Ryzen CPU on Blender.

I moved my project over to Nvidia CUDA.
I can even code on Windows. There is much better support. 

AMD are not a serious option for a real GPU Compute project for small team of coders using ROCm yet.

Maybe one day.

[dpospisi]

Yeah, I follow Proronix. That's the source from which I got the impression that Radeon would be usable.

But seems that the usecases they test are too basic or do not cover what I need.

Anyway, I think that I spent enaugh time on that. The only reason I bought AMD is 16GB VRAM. Once nvidia releases something competitive i'll probably swich back as you did.

[tnz]

Hi,

Did you try free drivers ? (mesa)

[dpospisi]

Yes, I tried those provided by ubuntu 20.04 and 21.04 beta. Also mesa-git. But they do not provide OpenCL. I tried to combine free drivers with amdgpu-pro opencl but it keeps crashing. Even Radeon Pro Render crashes pretty often with this combo.

[dpospisi]

I dual-booted to Win10 to see what is the situation there. It worked well and performace is excellent.

Shame they are not able to provide comparable experience on Linux.

This situation does not seem to be something new with Navi. This is something going on for years. They shoud fire the whole Linux driver squad, delete what they have and start from scratch again.

[colesdav]

Fiji (R9 Fury X/Fury/Nano) GrenadaXT (R9 390x) and RX Vega 64 / 56 cards seem to ~ work for Blender GPU/MultiGPU Rendering on Windows 10.

RX 590 and RX5700XT (Navi) have problems last time I checked.

[tnz]

If you've got a debian based distro, try to use one of my product : https://github.com/TNZfr/krn

I run Linux with the last kernel version locally compiled. Regarding my usage, I have a better experience with the last Linux 5.11 / free drivers comparing Win10 / Adrenalin on a 3900x / rx5700xt config.

For OpenCL stuff, I don't know if my confg is revelant.

[colesdav]

You might want to read this, if you decide to keep your RX6800 GPU: 
https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/temporary-gui-solution-to-monitor-your-amd-gpu-s-for-a...

[colesdav]

This might help you with something: 
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Radeon RX 6000

[voxceleste]

I've tried to use blender with my Vega 56 and it was confusing as hell!

AMD drivers are integrated in the linux kernel first of all. You can use "professional" branch of the driver, by installing something on top of the vanilla ones. Usually there's some packages for that in the distro's repository. If you are using ubuntu - it may have an older kernel, that doesn't have a proper support for your card. So you may (or may not) need a newer kernel.

I'm not sure if Ubuntu can install a newer kernel at all. You may look into Manjaro for that. It can just install a newer kernel through the System Settings GUI and work on top of that . Not saying that you should, because distro hopping can become a maddening experience, but at least you have that option. You also should be able to build a new kernel in Ubuntu, but it's a complicated process, that I never even tried.

[voxceleste]

I can't see or edit my previous post for some reason. The new Ubuntu beta has a newest kernel, so it should be fine on that front. Otherwise there should be a package for their pro drivers and I hope you will find a good guide on how to enable this stuff. It worked for me on other distro but was meh at best and very confusing, to be honest. Not sure who to blame here - AMD or blender or both or maybe myself for bringing all of this upon my head.

[Nick2020]

Agreed, AMD needs to re-think this.

It's such a pity. Nvidia has such a terrible reputation for its attitude to Linux - so it's natural to look to AMD.

Linux users to AMD: You make money by selling hardware, not software. It's good hardware, worth its price. You don't make money selling software. So what is the point of making your software proprietary? Just release the external specs for your hardware, and we programmers will do the rest. You'd get great support at zero cost to you. Every Linux user would ditch Nvidia and buy AMD. We'd have truly free (as in freedom) drivers and nobody would have to install anything - the Linux kernel team would build AMD drivers right into the standard kernel, with auto-detection at boot time, as we do with nearly every device.