Re: The state of Intel compute/AI packages.
On 12-10-2023 20:47, Cordell Bloor wrote:
Hi Jakub,
Hello Cordell,
It's perhaps a bit off-topic, but why was that?
I don't want to pollute the list, so I'll try to be as concise as I can.
Main reason is software support for Blender unfortunately.
I have two gfx906, but this GPU is disabled since 9 months due to
compiler bugs:
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/104786
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/8e56ded86d6261e8a937ab6ca8d724f0f42814c2
Once this happened I started to look for for a replacement.
Unfortunately RDNA2 has a nasty viewport bug that will break my
multi-monitor workflow:
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/100353 it looks more
like platform problem, so not exactly ROCm realated. Considering all of
this, I was unsure about RDNA3 future as well, as it had mixed reviews.
I was also hoping that HIP-RT in Blender would yield a substantial
performance gains on RDNA2/3, but it was less than I expected.
Additionally there is still no Linux support for HIP-RT after Windows
support was done 9 months ago. According to Blender OpenData benchmark
AMD has the lowest perf/$ comparing to the competition
https://opendata.blender.org/. And without solid HIP-RT I have doubts it
will change.
On a positive note I had a pretty good experience with Stable Diffusion
once I set it up properly with official Pytorch+ROCm stack. I haven't
experience any crashes or freezes when I stayed within recommended
workflows. SD frontend devs also provided some VRAM optimizations for
AMD hardware, so that was nice to see too. I still consider AMD a worthy
buy because of VRAM and build quality, but the state of software support
combined with the current perf/$ in Blender are a dealbreaker for me
right now.
The Debian OpenCL Team appears to be fairly active [1] and the bug
that you cited has now been fixed. While I can understand your
concerns, this is not a strong argument.
I see it now, and I'm happy it was resolved. I was worried mainly
because of the spam and lack of updates for a long time.
That (...) wouldn't really change what packages I could contribute to.
Completely understandable. I wish you all the best with completing ROCm
packaging in Debian!
Best regards,
Jakub Jaszewski
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