A GPU for vkdt...

Hardware
21

Arc is supposed to compete in the lower priced markets so hopefully something good comes out of that. The gpus look quite good at compute so far. Game benchmarks give a bad imagine to the cards due to years of per game optimizations AMD and Nvidia have on their drivers.

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22

FYI: Intel Arc Graphics A770 Launching 12 October For $329 USD - Phoronix

BTW: This card will only run on kernel > 6.0

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23

i shall certainly get one and test/make vkdt run well on it. seems to be the right class of price/compute power.

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24

As I think memory bandwidth is among the most important parameters for this kind off applications, I think the ARC A580 could punch well above it’s weight (if the specifications at https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-announces-arc-a770-gpu-at-329-launches-october-12th are right).

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25

Hi,
I don’t seem to find reviews that talk about that. Would be lovely if you had a link!
Cheers!

26

About the monitor ports, I must be missing something: Both HDMI and DP to DVI cables/adapters exist. So I don’t see why you’d need to restrict your GPU selection by type of ports or keep the old one in parallel.

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27

I don’t remember where I read it unfortunately. I checked blender benchmark website and there’s an entry for a weaker mobile version and it seems to fair fairly well compared to things in its price range. Plus a380(130€) vulkan game benchmarks, where it’s much more up to the hardware than the drivers, and it seems very competitive. Either way, first reviews of the a770 should be coming soon so hopefully someone puts it under some production benchmarks.

28

Thanks!
I’ll have a look at DG1 compute results then. Regarding vulkan, I remember someone talking about inherent issues that might not be driver but hardware scheduler related, but alas, I also don’t remember who that was. So yeah, we will see if more tests come out and if A770, A750, A580 can compete at least on the compute level. The A380 seemed meh for the price and power usage. But the A770 might save the value proposition by means of high memory bandwidth. We’ll see.

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30

This is great news, not needing to have the proprietary driver for opencl in AMD is a big plus. A bit sad that at the same time, regular mesa will most likely lose h264/5 in all major distributions.

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31

So, my kid, having moved into our basement for a couple of months before he buys his own house, has loaned me his GeForce GTX 1050 GPU with 4GB memory out of his streaming computer (yes, he has a few machines to do his nefarious thing…) , to try out vkdt. Still putting stuff together (modular PSU on order), how will this do?

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yay cool! looking forward to your findings. 4G should be enough for most tasks, and the 1050 sounds like a solid starting point for fast processing.

i did btw try to compile vkdt as library at some point, but got distracted. there are some minor things to consider/solve:

  • -fPIC vs -fPIE needs to change for executable vs library, and i didn’t spend enough time on it to introduce a switch into the build system for this
  • vkdt depends on a few files on disk (cameras.xml from rawspeed, colour profiles, compiled shader code, etc), and the current way of detecting the base folder uses readlink /proc/self/exe which needs to change for a library that has a different executable.
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33

Intel Arc are promising, but you’ll need a fairly new motherboard to get the most out of them and the drivers need some more time in the oven:

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34

…also in more parts of the world than in others you’ll have to be lucky to actually get your hands on one :frowning: (still hoping to be lucky here).

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35

Turns out I didn’t need the PSU, didn’t look closely enough for the modular connectors. pffft…

So, an installed GeForce GTX 1050, a compiled vkdt, but I get this:

WARNING: lavapipe is not a conformant vulkan implementation, testing use only.

vkdt -d qvk shows this for device 0:

dev 0: llvmpipe (LLVM 13.0.1, 256 bits)

instead of the card nomenclature. So, I assume lavapipe (software emulator?) is in the way of getting to the GPU, n’est ce pas? Then, as it seems to be part of mesa, can I unistall all that and get to goodness?

36

Never mind, installed the version 515 drivers and it’s up and running!

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37

yay cool! good to hear. the llvm thing is strange, but maybe eventually it’ll grow into a cpu emulation of the whole vulkan layer. that will be useful once it works well.

let me know if anything seems broken or clumsy, so i can fix.

38

Right now, warming to your UI… :laughing: I’m more of a “File → Open…” kind of fellow, but I’ll figure it out.

The most jarring thing was to open a raw and have it presented fully processed, in less time than rawproc takes just to generate the display output. Freaking quick…

(time passess…)

<stream_of_consciousness> Okay, okay, if I can figure out how to save my work, I’m going to trash every other thing I’ve built/installed ('cept G’MIC) and just use this. Once I figured out that little blop in most every parameter is a slider (yer dealing with an old fool here… :crazy_face: ) It Just Works! …Need to code a PR to save the processing string in the exported image file, then I can rm -rf rawproc… …Gotta figure out how to claim eminent domain over my kid’s GPU… </stream_of_consciousness>

What’s that song? “This Is How We Do It…” (repeat 'till you’re sick of hearing it…) :laughing:

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39

Noooooooooooo!
I use both of these programs, I hope that’s only a joke from you :slight_smile:
Rawproc may not be fast/slick etc. but it is excellent for tinkering and learning about raw processing.

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40

Kidding… :laughing:

Actually, what I’d like to do is remove rawproc’s gimage.cpp library and replace it with vkdt’s…

Edit: @hanatos is probably throwing up, now…

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