Radeon ROCm 2.6 Released - Without Navi Support But Adds BFloat16 & Other Features

[aufkrawall]

bridgman Unfortunately, folding@home still doesn't run with rocm (it doesn't even run with the PAL based proprietary driver, only orca works on Polaris).
But at least there seems to be some progress for other applications like Luxmark with 2.6, the more complex kernels now compile fast and don't crash anymore.

[coder]

Just wondered what AMD hardware that supported bfloat16 natively. However it seems the answer is "none" yet.

In most cases, IEEE 754 half-precision is more useful. AMD's hardware has pretty good support for it, since first-gen Vega.

Anyway, since Michael posts about the LLVM backend patches adding instructions for each new AMD GPU, we'll know in advance if/when they add hardware support for BFloat16.

[MadeUpName]

ROCm is a compute (OpenCL) driver. For video encoding, use VA-API.

Thanks bridgman

When you install the ROCM drivers from AMD it replaces a large chunk of your graphics stack and vainfo no longer works. There isn't a supplied AMD specific vainfo up in opt where AMD sticks it's stuff so I have no way of verifying what is supported with that software installed.

The reason I bring it up is that Davinci resolve on Linux supports h.264 on NVidia but not on AMD. When I have asked why that is I am told that AMD doesn't support h.264 encoding but I know that to be false on the kinds of cards we need to run to use Davinci Resolve. Any thoughts on how I can prove that the support is still there with the AMD stack installed?

Thanks

[bridgman]

I don't understand the connection between ROCm stack and FluidMotion. Didn't think we were supporting FluidMotion on Linux, but I will check.

[artivision]

I'll check, but I think that was deprecated in favor of open source equivalents. I'm pretty sure that image support in OpenCL-over-ROCR does not rely on it, for example.

With ROCM from AUR clinfo terminal shows Image_support=no. Svp4 the same. So i'm asking is there a plan to open source the motion interpolation code called Fluid Motion?

[bridgman]

Is this thing still (nearly?) unusable outside the 2 specific distros it supports?

The pre-built distro-specific binaries are not very useable outside the 2 specific distros they support (plus derivatives) but...

(a) the kernel code is upstream so you don't need to build kernel drivers for most usage scenarios and

(b) everything else is open source as well, and is being packaged by some distros

So "no".

[tildearrow]

Does any one know if h.264 encoding is supported with the ROCM drivers?

ROCm is a compute (OpenCL) driver. For video encoding, use VA-API.

[MadeUpName]

Does any one know if h.264 encoding is supported with the ROCM drivers?

[bridgman]

libhsa-ext-image64.so is part of hsa-ext-rocr-dev closed component and not present on many distributions like Arch.

I'll check, but I think that was deprecated in favor of open source equivalents. I'm pretty sure that image support in OpenCL-over-ROCR does not rely on it, for example.

[Aeder]

Is this thing still (nearly?) unusable outside the 2 specific distros it supports?