BTW the Mesa driver just merged in support for OpenCL 1.2. (from the older 1.1) Potential for some older cards to start computing again.
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My 6 GB RTX-2060 is performing well with darktable and openCL, but I havenāt had anything else to compare it to.
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Iāve bought an Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Frontier Edition on the first day when it came out. I only had problems with it ever since. Iāve been reporting the same issues countless of times for years and never did they got back to me or fixed anything.
AMD Linux drivers are terrible and unusable mess. Anyone on Linux in need of a GPU for video editing, compositing, photo editing or 3D work or game development should just go buy Nvidia and save themselves a huge amount of trouble.
There isnāt a single program that just runs with AMDGPU-PRO or even ROCm driver. Not DaVinci Resolve, not Blender, not Natron, not OBS Studio, not Darktable. And when you think something runs then all of a sudden I get a similar thing youāve gotten. A frozen colorful screen and I loose all my work. Itās shit, thatās what AMD is or at least their drivers.
And the only time they got back to me they started crying how they donāt have the resources to do a proper QA with their drivers before the release and how they are sorry but to please go f**k myself.
AMD is terrible and should burn in hell.
Donāt ever buy an AMD gpu, not for any reason. Youāll regret it a million times. It has given me nothing but grief.
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Thatās what Iāve been experiencing with my RX580. Complete lockups with corrupted screen as soon as I do any serious opencl calculations. I think I may contact the retailer I bought the GPU from, and see if I can return it as faulty.
The open source driver for AMD is much better than the OS driver for nVidia GPUs, cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/inybzn/is_amd_open_source_drivers_good/
It says you can even use the open source MESA drivers for AMD GPUs and have working OpenCL support!
In general the state of drivers in Linux is in favour of AMD in the last so many years. While nVidia is actively restricting functionality of open source drivers, AMD instead opened up and worked together to create proper, functional open source drivers. If you didnāt already, I suggest you start using that one instead of the closed source AMD driver.
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Just look at this thread:
I literally begged them to hook me up with someone from the development or qa team who could confirm and reproduce the issues I have. Iāve offered to do a qa with other software for FREE, Iāve offered to bring other people too. Iām sure theyād be willing to contribute because for the last 3 years I see the same people over and over on various amd channels whenever there is an issue. On BlackMagic, Blender, AMD, OBS forums and github issues etc. Every time the same 50 people willing to test, report help, even pay for more support.
AMD just ignored all of us. You can see how they are handling the latest issue with the driver being unable to install on 20.04. They literally excused themselves by saying that Nvidia had similar issue a while back and like wth do we expect from amd?
Iām sick and tired of that company.
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Thatās not what Iāve experienced though. Iād rather use closed source drivers which work, than opensource ones which hang my system with a corrupted displayā¦
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Well, you canāt. You can install it but if none of the apps that require it work then itās worth shit if they claim to support something.
Itās not like you have a choice, If you have these issues you are probably doing professional work and making money from it. The issue with AMD is, open source drivers donāt work but their proprietary drivers donāt work well either! You loose every time with AMD.
I donāt like Nvidia being so closed but what choice do we have? AMD has gotten a great deal amount of unjustified good press. It might be opensource but itās worth nothing if you canāt use it for anything more than you could do with intel integrated graphics. Which are also open source.
So I bought a top of the line, flagship AMD gpu and itās not more usable than the integrated Intel GPU in my laptop.
Fun fact, I can run OBS and Natron on my laptop but I canāt on my desktop because of AMDs shit drivers and Linux support.
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@KristijanZic, Iām sure I came across that thread while searching my issues with opencl crashes on my RX580ā¦
I do wish I had bought an Nvidia card though. While the nvidia I had considered may not have had as much GPU vram (6gb, vs 8gb on the RX580), itād prbably have been working betterā¦
Luckily I do have a spare (if somewhat old and slow) GT1030 I can swap to in the meantime to get a stable system with slow opencl acceleration.
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Did you try it like itās explained and laid out here?
It sucks that your situation is like that, but saying that AMD sucks in Linux is just not true anymore. Maybe for you and your usecase, but thatās far from general, right?
@bestek. Iāve tried the kernel amd opensource drivers, with the amdgpu opencl drivers from the amd website. Iāve also tried using the amdgpu-pro driver and amdgpu-pro opencl driver from the amdgpu-pro package using amdgpu-install --headless, --opencl=legacy --no-dkms
Iāve also tried the kernel opensource gpu driver, with the amdgpu rocm driver installed from the amdgpu-pro package. amdgpu-pro-install --opencl=legacy,rocm.
While Opencl does work, it is very unstable, leading to the system crashing with a corrupt display.
So what has your experience been using opencl on amd gpus?
I have no experience using OpenCL on AMD GPUs in Linux, Iām just curious if there is a way to fix this problem.
Have you tried using this patch? It doesnāt seem to have gotten through yet, but maybe itās worth a shot. Itās mentioned here again.
It is, the open source drivers that come with the kernel work well but they canāt be used for use cases harder than what an integrated GPU can be used. You know why people praise the open source drivers? Because before that it was an achievement if you could even boot your system with AMD gpu and launch display manager etc.
So now it works well for booting your system and launching guis etc but anything accelerated just doesnāt work right, ever. And why do you buy a flagship gpu? Itās not for itās not for browsing the web or facebook. Itās for resource heavy tesks that require speed and acceleration and for use with OpenCL, HIP. And you canāt do that on Linux.
There arenāt many use cases for a high end flagship gpu. Itās for ML or rendering. Those are the only two use cases and it fails on both. I know the open source part in the kernel works well, but thatās just not the complete driver, it canāt do any acceleration, you canāt do anything more then browsing the web and even that will fail if you try something like threejs heavy apps etc.
There you go. You should try it, youāll end up pulling all of your hair out. And if OpenCL doesnāt work then my 1000eur gpu in no better then a 20$ integrated one. Actually OpenCL works perfectly on my intel integrated gpu on my laptop.
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Well, another use case for using a big GPU in Linux would be gaming?
But thatās about it, I agree.
I wasnāt aware of the abominable state of non-gaming focussed use-cases of AMD on Linux, hence my surprise.
But it seems youāve had your share of searching and trying and still came home with empty hamds, so I will not try and pretend itās not a big problem. Iām sorry for saying it wasnāt.
Iām wondering why this hasnāt been picked up yet by the mainstream crowd, though. If it was, I would have known about this already. I guess OpenCL use on Linux isnāt that common enough for the word to spread.
Libre Office will take advantage of openCL.
https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
I do not know the quality of this test but given the cuda core count & frequency of a 1030, this chart place it at its place in the opencl calculation ranking : right near the bottom. I think you canāt make a bad choice upgrading your card.
If you are short on PSU wattage (as I am with a 250w PSU) most of the 1050TI or 1650 versions released by various manufacturers do not require extra power connector.
EDIT : Sorry didānt see that the thread was that old and that the issue has been adressed a long time ago ā¦ sorry for the noise !
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No worries @clind
Seeing as Iāve now arranged a return & refund of the RX580 from the retailer (which rhymes with a certain rain forest 
Iāll be using my old GT1030 until I can buy a replacement Nvidia GPU! I recently upgraded my PSU to 750W from 500W, so any card should do. Unfortunately GPUs seem to be in short supply, however itāll be a few days to a week before the refund gets returned to my bank account (rather than a refund as a gift voucher!) so thatāll give me more time to look around.
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Well, gaming is also rendering.
It was picked up by Blender, Resolve and Tensorflow users but it seems like it wasnāt because I guess most of the people use Nvidia for those purposes or they just move to Nvidia when they start encountering problems.
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Sad to see the heat AMD is getting here. To the best of my knowledge at least they are providing code for the upstream driver.
But I understand the frustration if things are not working. I hope that this whole OpenCL thing gets included with the open source libraries at some point.
I am writing this, as I have made very opposite experiences. I have a RX580 and a RX570 installed in two desktop systems. No issues but some power management stuff, in my hardware setup, specifically my monitor, sometimes there is no output after the display was set to power save. But that happened under Windows 10 as well. Once I figured that out, I stopped investigating and simply turn off the monitor in times of no need.
I had Ubuntu 20.04.1 and Leap 15.2 with the AMD official driver from their website running. I used the distribution delivered upstream driver and just installed the OpenCL part. darktable worked without problems with OpenCL.
If you install the amdgpu-pro-install script, dkms gets installed and a module gets compiled. If you call the script with --no-dkms , it will tell you that amdgpu-pro is only installable with dkms.
But you can call the non pro script
amdgpu-install --no-dkms --opencl=pal,legacy --headless
AMD also delivers an uninstall script to remove their installation. Reboot is recommended after doing so.
On Tumbleweed I installed rocm with the installed RX580. I basically followed that article or the thread here on the forum and adjusted everything for the recent version.
darktable works with it and blender sees the OpenCL part/graphic card properly (havenāt worked yet with blender, just set it up).
My issues were not so much with Darktable, Opencl & my RX580, but more when I was doing heavy OpenCL calculations using my RX580. Anyway, my RX580 is on itās way back to the retailer, so hopefully Iāll buy a replacement Nvidia GPU soon.