[GTALUG] Running Dell branded Nvidia gtx 1060 in non-dell system

Wed Aug 7 13:02:32 EDT 2019

On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 11:25 AM Alex Volkov <subscriptions at flamy.ca> wrote:
>
> Hey Nick,
>
> See my replies below
>
Hey Alex,
Below are some final comments.
> On 2019-08-06 8:09 p.m., xerofoify via talk wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 4:23 PM Alex Volkov via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> >> Yes.
> >>
> >> Unfortunately I went though the debugging process before I got to the paragraph. On the upside I think I got a lightning talk out of it, that I'll try to present at the next meeting.
> >>
> >> Alex.
> >>
> > Alex,
> > I don't know how much your intending to do with that GPU or otherwise.
> > If your just using Nvidia I can't help
> > you as mentioned but if your interested in GPU workloads  was looking
> > at the AMDGPU backend for LLVM.
> > Not sure if there is one that targets Nvidia cards but it may be of
> > interest to you as you would be able to
> > compile directly for the GPU rather than using an API to access it.
> > Not sure about Nvidia so double check
> > that.
> >
> > Here is the official documentation for AMD through:
> > https://llvm.org/docs/AMDGPUUsage.html
>
> I haven't gotten that far into it, just ran a few ML tutorials, I
> haven't yet created any of my own models yet, my knowledge is limited to
> trying out tensorflow package and getting tensorflow-gpu (nvidia
> bindings) verifiably working with the hardware.
>
> Turns out NVIDIA drivers have this nice feature of falling back to CPU
> processing when there's an error -- this is useful when needing to get
> things done at any cost, not so much when attempting to debug the issue.
>
> So far I mostly used the card for hw-accelerated h264 encoding through
> ffmpeg.
>
The only warning here and it may not matter for you personally is
the encoding picture isn't as great as on a CPU at least to my
knowledge. If your encoding raw video or some things like
uncompressed bluray quality its a huge deal but otherwise
you may not  notice. Again if your just encoding for twitch or
youtube quality its probably fine.
> > If your using it for machine learning it may be helpful to be aware of
> > it as you could compile
> > the libraries if possible onto the GPU target rather than access than
> > indirectly through
> > the CPU. Again not sure of what libraries but you should for most of
> > the popular ones
> > and that may increase throughput a lot as it's direct assembly for the
> > card not abstracted.
>
> Thanks for the advice, I'm not that far along in the process to use this
> information.
>
> You seem to know a lot on the topic of optimizing workloads on GPU,
> would you like to come to our meeting next Tuesday and give a 5-10
> minute talk on this? -- https://gtalug.org/meeting/2019-08/
>
>
> > As for GPU memory that may be a issue as Hugh mentioned depending on the size
> > of the workload. I don't think it would matter for your tutorials but
> > going across the
> > PCI bus is about as bad as cache misses for CPUs so best to not have them if
> > possible. If you were able to find a 6GB version that would be more than enough
> > for most workloads excluding professional. 1060s were shipped with either 3 or
> > 6GB so that may be something for card you ordered to check. Retail I recall
> > it being about a 30-50 Canadian difference and for double the RAM it was
> > a good detail at the time if you bought one.
>
> There seem to be a lot of gamers who upgraded to 1080 selling used 1060
> 6GB for a reasonable price. I got MSI GTX 1060 6GB version.
>
> So far with h264 encoding I've noticed that there's significant
> processing drop, when the card finishes encoding a chunk of data, then
> saturates PCI bus.
>
>
> Alex.
>
Odd it should forward it in batches. That seems like a missed
optimization to me.
Not sure if your aware but most after market cards i.e. OEM or board
partners overclock
there cards out of the box. Not sure how much that card is overclocked
but it would
be up to 300mhz than a reference card.  I always recommend aftermarket unless
validation of the cards is key and than just go for Quardo as their
more validated.

Nick
> >
> > Hopefully that helps a little,
> >
> > Nick
> >
> > P.S. Not aware but I'm assuming there is one for gcc as well if you would
> > prefer that for your development or learning.
> >
> >> On 2019-08-05 11:12 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> >>
> >> | From: Alex Volkov via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
> >>
> >> | I have another system with Ryzen 5 2400G and was hoping to run ROCm on it, but
> >> | as it turns out -- ROCm doesn't fully support AMD cards with built-in
> >> | graphics. I still can install discreet card into that system but the solution
> >> | is not as cheap as getting a used GTX off craigslist.
> >>
> >> In January I saw cheap Radeo RX 580s on Kijiji too.  I haven't looked
> >> recently.
> >>
> >> One advantage of AMD over nvidia is that larger memories are more common.
> >>
> >> It's a shame about ROCm's lack of APU support.  Parts of it are there.
> >>
> >> <https://rocm.github.io/hardware.html>
> >>
> >>      The iGPU in AMD APUs
> >>
> >>      The following APUs are not fully supported by the ROCm stack.
> >>
> >> “Carrizo” and “Bristol Ridge” APUs
> >> “Raven Ridge” APUs
> >>
> >>      These APUs are enabled in the upstream Linux kernel drivers and the
> >>      ROCm Thunk. Support for these APUs is enabled in the ROCm OpenCL
> >>      runtime. However, support for them is not enabled in our HCC compiler,
> >>      HIP, or the ROCm libraries. In addition, because ROCm is currently
> >>      focused on discrete GPUs, AMD does not make any claims of continued
> >>      support in the ROCm stack for these integrated GPUs.
> >>
> >>      In addition, these APUs may may not work due to OEM and ODM choices
> >>      when it comes to key configurations parameters such as inclusion of
> >>      the required CRAT tables and IOMMU configuration parameters in the
> >>      system BIOS. As such, APU-based laptops, all-in-one systems, and
> >>      desktop motherboards may not be properly detected by the ROCm drivers.
> >>      You should check with your system vendor to see if these options are
> >>      available before attempting to use an APU-based system with ROCm.
> >>
> >>
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