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system2 6 hours ago

I wish there were a way to use RDNA1 cards with CUDA for AMD. My 5700XTs are sitting in a drawer.

monster_truck 5 hours ago | parent [-]

RDNA1 isn't good for a whole lot, even flagship RDNA2 cards are a stretch for many things. The lack of WMMA/matrix multiply/BF16 is too severe of a penalty.

The FP16 throughput on RDNA1 is both shader reliant and requires everything to be packed first. Even with 2 or 4 or 1000 cards, you would be consuming all of the available memory and memory bandwidth just packing and unpacking values, and if you really want to dump a hundred billion tokens into making it work anyways, you're only going to find out that even if you bother to sit there ferrying packed values to ram or disk before then issuing the instructions, paying that already severe penalty again when the values then have to be unpacked is so steep of a cost that the 256 BF16 flops/cu/clock's effective throughput is outright lower than simply doing it on a Zen 2 processor. You also don't have INT8 (or really INT4) on RDNA1 so the other RNS/CRT tricks aren't viable.

Sadly RDNA1's VCN2 also lacks actually good x264 bframe encoding support, or even P010 for 10 bit color, so what I'm saying is you should sell them. Used Radeon VII's are like $260, you'll go a lot further with those especially if you throw in a 7900XTX, and then augment that further with a 9070 CRE (you only want it for its int8 cores), and of course 128GB of ram.

E: And sure, that's 3, or ideally 4 GPUs, and a good bit of extra work. But that gets you up to more than halfway to the naive performance of a $15,000 MI300x in a surprising amount of cases, with additional strengths that it lacks. For far less than half of the cost

system2 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree, I should've sold them last year when they hit $500 each. I have like 8 of them from my mining days. What a silly mistake I made.

dracotomes 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I still have a 5700XT I bought in 2019 (i think) for 300€ in my gaming rig. Crazy that they were going for $500 6 years later.

system2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I just checked, they are going for $150-180 on eBay U.S. I guess I will let them go now.

monster_truck 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's volatile as all get out and I'm not going to call out any token by name but if you needed another nudge, you can absolutely cover the cost of power and the 9070 GRE (or even XT) itself before the warranty expires by mining (without holding/speculating), which has been my breakeven point for sidestepping any guilt I might feel from buying another flagship GPU.

But to reason in other direction, unless you absolutely need cards right now, you could throw that ~$1440 in a 6 month CD and let the 4.5% pay for the tax or shipping on a 10090 XT or whatever RDNA 5 flagship when those drop in about as much time. If it lands anywhere close to what the rumors are indicating it should be a fucking monster.

Nexxxeh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You'll be doing gamers a favour, coz the AI boom has be a slaughter for PC gaming. The price of RAM, storage, and graphics...