Comment by superkuh
5 hours ago
AMD hasn't signaled in behavior or words that they're going to actually support ROCm on $specificdevice for more than 4-5 years after release. Sometimes it's as little as the high 3.x years for shrinks like the consumer AMD RX 580. And often the ROCm support for consumer devices isn't out until a year after release, further cutting into that window.
Meanwhile nvidia just dropped CUDA/driver support for 1xxx series cards from their most recent drivers this year.
For me ROCm's mayfly lifetime is a dealbreaker.
Last year, AMD ran a GitHub poll for ROCm complaints and received more than 1,000 responses. Many were around supporting older hardware, which is today supported either by AMD or by the community, and one year on, all 1,000 complaints have been addressed, Elangovan said. AMD has a team going through GitHub complaints, but Elangovan continues to encourage developers to reach out on X where he’s always happy to listen.
Seems like they're making some effort in that direction at least. If you have specific concerns, maybe try hitting up Anush Elangovan on Twitter?
Is it really that short? This support matrix shows ROCm 7.2.1 supporting quite old generations of GPUs, going back at least five or six years. I consider longevity important, too, but if they're actively supporting stuff released in 2020 (CDNA), I can't fault them too much. With open drivers on Linux, where all the real AI work is happening, I feel like this is a better longevity story than nvidia...where you're dependent on nvidia for kernel drivers in addition to CUDA.
https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/compatibility/compatibil...
ROCm is open source and TheRock is community maintained, and in a minute the first Linux distro will have native in-tree builds. It will be supported for the foreseeable future due to AMDs open development approach.
It is Nvidia that has the track record of closed drivers and insisting on doing all software dev without community improvements to expected results.
> expected results
The defacto GPU compute platform? With the best featureset?
And the worst privacy, transparency, and FOSS integration due to their insistence on a heavily proprietary stack.
Also pretty hard to beat a Strix Halo right now in TPS for the money and power consumption.
Even that aside there exist plenty like me that demand high freedom and transparency and will pay double for it if we have to.
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I was thinking to get 2x r9700 for a home workstation (mostly inference). It is much cheaper than a similar nvidia build. But still not sure if good value or more trouble.
I own a single R9700 for the same reason you mentioned, looking into getting a second one. Was a lot of fiddling to get working on arch but RDNA4 and ROCm have come a long way. Every once in a while arch package updates break things but that’s not exclusive to ROCm.
LLM’s run great on it, it’s happily running gemma4 31b at the moment and I’m quite impressed. For the amount of VRAM you get it’s hard to beat, apart from the Intel cards maybe. But the driver support doesn’t seem to be that great there either.
Had some trouble with running comfyui, but it’s not my main use case, so I did not spent a lot of time figuring that out yet
Thanks for the answer. Brings my hope up. Looking in my local shops, I can get 3 cards for the price of one 5090.
May I ask, what kind of tok/s you are getting with the r9700? I assume you got it fully in vram?
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Talking to friends who have fought more homelab battles than I ever will, my sense is that (1) AMD has done a better job with RDNA4 than the past generations, and (2) it seems very workload-dependent whether AMD consumer gear is "good value", "more trouble", or both at the same time.
Edit: I misread the "2x r9700" as "2 rx9700" which differs from the topic of this comment (about RNDA4 consumer SKUs). I'll keep my comment up, but anyone looking to get Radeon PRO cards can (should?) disregard.
Given RDNA3 was a pathetic joke, it wouldn't be hard for them to do a better job.
I have this setup, with 2x 32Gb cards. It's perfect for my needs, and cheaper than anything comparable from NV.
Driver support eats directly into driver development