Nvidia Quadro RTX4000 on PTB in Linux?

Hardware
,
1

Hi, does anyone have any info on how this video card will work in Linux? Or alternative suggestions?

Thanks,

Luke

2

Are you planning to buy it or already have it? If latter, just test it, if former, specify what you need and the community may have better alternatives to suggest.

3

Thanks, Diederick.

I haven’t bought it yet. It was spec’d by the system integrator that my university uses.

I’m moving from Apple laptops to a Linux desktop, and will use it for stimulus presentation. Any visual stimuli will be 2D so I don’t need great performance from the GPU. I’m more concerned that it has decent Linux drivers and works well with PTB (especially timing-wise).

If anyone has any suggestions at all, they would be very welcome.

4

I have one system with a NVidia RTX2070 and an otherwise optimal PTB Ubuntu setup and I have regular sync errors. NVidia’s drivers are proprietary, and therefore it is hard for Mario to properly support them like he does for AMD/Intel.

The rest of my systems were specced with AMD Radeon Pro WX5100/4100 cards and they all work flawlessly for PTB. So my strong recommendation is to go with a chaeaper AMD card…

1 Like
5

Thank you, that’s useful info. I naively had the idea that Nvidia drivers were better supported in Linux, but clearly that’s wrong.

6

I’m no expert on it, but Mario has been very clear. On Linux, you should strongly prefer AMD graphics cards

1 Like
7

Specifically AMD and Intel. If you don’t have need for special features, more than 3 displays, or high performance, Intel and AMD are equivalent in quality and PTB support.

If you need higher graphics performance than what Intel can do, or more than 2-3 displays, or highest color precision (ie. more than 10 bit per channel), or VRR/FreeSync support for flexible timing, or (coming soon to a Psychtoolbox near you) HDR support, then a AMD gpu would be needed. Or modern AMD integrated graphics.

NVidia should be avoided, unless you have a very good reason. The only good reasons i can think of is maybe if you needed support for frame-sequential stereo with NVidia NVision shutter goggles - a stereo capable Quadro might have an edge there atm. – assumption, not actually tested, because i don’t have any shutter goggles or Quadro cards to test. The other one is if you must do GPU computing under NVidia’s proprietary CUDA compute api. The open standard OpenCL is supported by AMD and Intel as well. AMD is afaik working on some kind of cross-compiler that may be able to translate certain CUDA programs to OpenCL or AMD’s heterogeneous computing api’s (RocM). I talked to one of their software engineers about that a year ago, and they were quite optimistic about the ability to run CUDA on AMD as well via the translator iff the code to be translated is available as source code. I haven’t tested anything though - not enough time. So CUDA plug & play might be the only valid reason to choose NVidia, and even that should fade away if AMD does a good job with their portability RocM effort.

Slides, Lightning Talk about AMD’s CUDA replacement efforts from 2018:

But for the foreseeable time, possibly forever depending on NVidia, NVidia gpu’s will only be second class citizens for Psychtoolbox on Linux, because NVidia is not playing that well with the open-source community as AMD and Intel do, so my options for supporting stuff are very limited.

This btw. is written in multiple places on our website. If somebody can tell me what i have to do or write so people actually read this message, i would be most grateful.

-mario

1 Like
8

I may add that on the AMD side, the sweet spot with Psychtoolbox atm. would probably be a Polaris or Vega class gpu. Polaris is the most tested one by myself atm. Vega is so far untested by myself, but expected to work as well as Polaris, and it has a slight edge in functionality for use with FreeSync/Adaptive Sync displays. The latest generation Navi gpu’s, while also expected to work well, but also not tested by myself, will at the moment not be able to use PTB’s bag of low-level tricks in case there would be any unexpected trouble.

9

Thanks, Mario - I really appreciate you taking the time to go through this.

I’ve got an old Polaris RX480 I can use, but I will probably try a Navi card as well. Sooner or later we probably won’t be able to anything else, so may as well take the plunge now and see how it operates (with fallback to the RX480 in an emergency).

I’ll post an update on here once the system arrives, in case it’s of any help to others.

10

Polaris sounds fine to me. Atm. the most well tested gpu class by myself. It’s surely interesting to me to hear how Navi performs, but be aware that these cards are very new, so the likelihood of immature drivers is higher. Also certain PTB low-level tricks are not supported on Navi atm., e.g., the very high precision color display modes with more than 10 bits precision.