ROCm OpenCL Is Still Getting Ready To Rock For Vega
With the Radeon Vega hardware, the ROCm-based OpenCL stack is what's used with their older OpenCL driver not supporting this new GPU architecture. Thus AMDGPU-PRO is bundling the ROCm OpenCL driver for Vega while their older OpenCL driver is still bundled and used by default for pre-Vega hardware.
Our remote testing of OpenCL on the Vega Frontier Edition have been mixed while unfortunately the Radeon RX Vega testing hasn't been that great. The OpenCL driver does report correctly via clinfo, but many tests fail or otherwise perform slowly...
For just a quick look: here's how the RX Vega 64 is running with AMDGPU-PRO's 17.30 ROCm OpenCL driver compared to the competition:
Yes, the slowest performance with something clearly wrong with the OpenCL driver but it was functioning and indeed reporting it was running off the GPU and not the CPU.
And it had the highest system AC power consumption, so clearly the GPU is being kept busy...
In the days ahead there will hopefully be a new ROCm release to straighten things out better for Vega. And as reported in our review, the 2MB page support should be very exciting for OpenCL performance. But if you aren't a heavy OpenCL user, this can be good news as perhaps now there won't be a mad rush of miners trying to buy up the RX Vega inventory this morning for GPU cryptocurrency mining, at least until the OpenCL support is straightened out... So perhaps you may find good luck finding the RX Vega 56 or RX Vega 64 this morning at a reasonable price.
At least the OpenGL and Vulkan performance is in better shape as shown in our Radeon RX Vega 56 / 64 Linux review and the open-source support is just exciting to see for a GPU at-launch, so go check that out!
4 Comments
