AMD Radeon PRO W7700 Launches As $999 GPU With Fully Open-Source Upstream Linux Drivers

[Panix]

I was expecting also a bit of a comparison with the non Pro cards. What makes these cards Pro and is it useful for let's say Blender usage?

I doubt it.... HIP-RT still doesn't work in Linux. ;-)

[Panix]

Thank you, I will do that. Really enjoying Nvidia's CUDA support thoughout their line.

Does AMD have any support at all in video work/productivity (in Linux)? I mean, if you compare to Nvidia/CUDA?

[oleid]

Does AMD have any support at all in video work/productivity (in Linux)? I mean, if you compare to Nvidia/CUDA?

Sure.

[Svyatko]

When comparing the W7900 to the 7900XTX, the only difference I could find is VRAM quantity. Traditionally, AMD's pro cards would have significantly better FP64 performance but in this case they appears to be the same.

Radeon RX 7800 XT (Navi 32) - 1.166 fp64 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro W7700 (Navi 32) - 0.884 fp64 TFLOPS
Same memory & cache sizes, less bandwidth, lesser CUs with 2x price.
This is fail without Pro drivers.

[Svyatko]

Has the closed source driver reached EOL?

Pro drivers are available for Windows, not for Linux.

[Svyatko]

Does AMD have any support at all in video work/productivity (in Linux)? I mean, if you compare to Nvidia/CUDA?

Well, AMD works sometimes.
Jumping through burning hoops:

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AMD_GPGPU

[ElectricPrism]

Michael: the W7700 enjoys fully upstream and working open-source Linux graphics driver support for launch day

Title: Fully Open-Source Upstream Linux Drivers

What exactly does that mean? MESA?

So it doesn't mean there is anything different about the hardware compared to other AMD lineups in terms of open-sourceness?

[stormcrow]

I was expecting also a bit of a comparison with the non Pro cards. What makes these cards Pro and is it useful for let's say Blender usage?

Things home and gaming users don't usually care about: certification compliance for specific products used in the workstation market. Performance is important, but secondary. So long as the device delivers a consistent FPS for Y product at NNNN resolution (usually 60 FPS - like most non-gaming monitors) along with workstation compute without crashing that's all anyone cares about. Pro workstation market isn't about FPS at all costs.

[stormcrow]

What exactly does that mean? MESA?

So it doesn't mean there is anything different about the hardware compared to other AMD lineups in terms of open-sourceness?

As far as customer support is concerned, that just means you don't have to worry about driver stack support growing stale in subsequent iterations of an open source display stack whether the display device driver package is a separate software package or not. I don't really think this is all that much of a selling point to most customers of these kinds of GPUs as it is a PR thing. Most corporate and even academic customers buying hardware like this are buying because the whole system been certified to meet certain requirements from whichever certification authority they need to use. This requires a slow track distribution to continue - you don't want the possibility of breaking changes being introduced on equipment you depend on everyday for work, and any legal requirements that rule the industry. Hardware usually gets replaced as an atomic unit. When it's time to upgrade, the old system is retired/sold, and the new one takes its place after a suitable transition time. Any software updates tend to be slow and piecemeal based on a cycle which may or may not be immediately after the distro releases updates depending on how sensitive to changes the environment may be (if ever).

For example, in the digital forensics industry you (are supposed to) have a set procedure for validating your results each time something significant changes in your system stack. That takes time, but the alternative is saavy lawyers may be able to successfully attack your results if you didn't do your due diligence the last time Debian (as an example) pushed out a kernel or glibc update to stable. Dead box forensics usually has nothing to do with GPUs, but it's offered as an example of what at least one industry (should) be doing and why updates can legitimately be slow paced.

[sharpjs]

It's worth noting these also have ECC VRAM, which the consumer cards don't, AFAIK. I'd buy one of these if it had fractional virtualization support in hardware.