AMD GPU: professional graphics vs. consumer gaming cards?

Hi all,

We are currently buying a new workstation. Its primary short-term use is non-PTB (3D labelling of microCT scans so needs a reasonable GPU) but I am using this purchase as a chance to buy a workstation which will also be suitable for my PTB needs (video playback to birds at 120 fps; current workstation with Radeon Pro WX4100, Ubuntu, Octave is still working just fine but getting older). We have a supplier who will build the machine for us, and I’ve asked for AMD GPU not NVIDIA.

At this point, I’ve reached the limits of my hardware knowledge and I’m confused about the AMD options, so I’m hoping someone can help me out. The supplier has suggested the Radeon Pro W5500 (a ‘professional graphics’ card), and I’m concerned that this would not be optimal for PTB as it seems to be optimized for the pro driver and have features we won’t need (even for the microCT work). The available ‘consumer’ card that they can get as an alternative is the Radeon RX 6600 XT.

I know that RDNA/Navi is new and there are no guarantees either card will work well with PTB, but in case anybody can help out with a bit of insight into pros + cons of professional graphics cards vs. consumer gaming ones, I’d be very grateful!

Many thanks in advance,

Clio

Pro vs. consumer doesn’t really matter for PTB, so if you don’t need the specific Pro features, then no need to get a Pro card. GPU’s are very expensive atm. due to the chip shortages, so it isn’t the greatest time for buying them atm.

Phoronix tested the RX 6600 XT and found it working fine under Linux with the recommended Open-Source driver stack.

For Ubuntu 20.04-LTS you’d need to install the hwe stack for Linux 5.13 (minimum requirement for this gpu Linux 5.11), and the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04-LTS in a month will have Linux 5.15 and various other useful improvements, so that’s even easier.

The fact that the most recent Navi+ AMD gpu’s are not tested with PTB doesn’t mean that i’d expect any real problems, just that i don’t have any suitable hw to test and confirm there aren’t any, given the severe lack of funding for PTB. The RX 6600 XT has the latest graphics technology and display engines, enabling the latest PTB features under Linux like FreeSync fine-grained display timing support with suitable monitors.

-mario

Thanks Mario, that’s very helpful info. Very much appreciated.

Best,

Clio

Here my little occasional “commercial” that the best way to appreciate my work is to co-fund it a little bit by buying membership with priority support. Click this link for more info. We could really urgently use the money from as many labs as possible if PTB is to continue in the future..

-mario

I can’t speak to this first hand (yet), but I have noticed that the VPIxx team has highlighted some issues with AMD Pro graphics cards. See VPixx FAQ titled “What kind of graphics card do I need?”.

Note: We strongly recommend against using Nvidia Quadro or AMD Pro series graphics card as we have had issues with their drivers in the past.

While professional series gpu’s generally don’t have advantages over the cheaper consumer models, maybe with rare exceptions like use of frame-sequential stereo goggles, that advice of VPixx is somewhat non-sensical. Graphics and display drivers between same gpu families of consumer and pro gpus usually share > 90% of code (and potential bugs), and the hardware is mostly identical, as you pay extra money for support, validation and extended warranties or availability of replacement parts, or maybe some features like ECC VRAM that may be useful for scientific gpu computing/number crunching.

And in general, whole families/generations of gpu models share the same features and driver/hardware bugs, not specific models. Consumer class gpu’s are bought more frequently, so in that sense are better beta-tested by the masses of consumers, except for the special niche pro use cases for which Pro gpu’s provide extra validation by the vendor for the extra money. Niches like computer aided design CAD/CAM or common pro 3D modelling (3DS Max, Maya, etc.) software, certainly not vision science / neuroscience.

That’s why I currently recommend against NVidia gpu’s, especially on Linux, because their proprietary drivers are undebuggable/unfixable by people like myself, so less help can be provided in case of trouble. And various special open-source features contributed by myself for vision science are missing from their proprietary drivers.

I can btw. confirm the brokeness of the NVidia GeForce GTX 1650 in Vpixx list, at least with Ubuntu 20.04.5-LTS current NVidia proprietary drivers. This is the only NVidia i have for testing atm. and it doesn’t work for identity pixel passthrough.

The advice against AMD Radeon WX 4100 is probably outdated. It is a Polaris gpu with DCE-11.2 display engine, which had broken pixel passthrough for a short period of time under Linux until i diagnosed and fixed it. The bugfix is in all currently shipping Linux distros since at least Ubuntu 20.04. In fact, Polaris class gpu’s are among the most well-tested gpu’s with PTB on Linux atm.

In the past I was better able to pro-actively test and fix such things at least on Linux, but the severe lack of funding on our side makes extensive testing a luxury now that we can no longer afford, not even on Linux which is generally and still by far the highest quality and easiest to handle OS for neuroscience applications, as long as most of our users don’t give much of a damn about the quality of their research software tools, or at least don’t express that in money contributions.

-mario

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As always, thank you Mario for the additional context and high-quality response!

With regards to funding, I continue to advocate that teams using Psychtoolbox in our labs should also plan to purchase support memberships. I know that is a small drop in the hat for what is needed, but I’m seeing it gain traction at least in our small organization and I hope it makes at least a small difference for you and your team.

Thank you for your time and support.

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We use WX4100 and WX5100 with the Display++ that should require the same pixel passthrough and we never had any problems, so yes that advice may be based on some outdated driver bug or something?

See "Dithering" with Ubuntu 22.04 / MD Radeon Pro WX 3200 / ViewPIXX - #9 by jamespherman

→ Fixed by myself and fix in all distros since 11th October 2022.
→ Affected Polaris gpu family, e.g., WX4100, WX5100 for a couple of months.

Long solved on Linux, ofc. at a financial loss of over 1000 Euros to the PTB project at that time.

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