I’m looking to upgrade from a dying RX 590, and I’m eyeing the RX 6950 XT, which I can get for slightly less than 800 USD, I’m wondering if that’d be a good choice.
It’s mostly for gaming, but I kinda want to run ML stuff and blender on the side, so I hope ROCm works well enough for that, I want to avoid NVIDIA because of Linux.
As far as Linux goes, I have a RX 6700 XT and am running Arch. Stable diffusion works great (most of the time, see below), especially with the 12 GB or VRAM. Most games work flawlessly, as long as they are run through Proton. PC VR to the Quest 2 works okay, but I believe the issues I have there are mostly due to ALVR. I have had no issues with Blender (after ROCm is set up and HIP enabled in Blender).
I have experienced GPU crashes in certain niche situations (e.g. in the decode step of a too-large image in SD or in some versions of ALVR), but I have not figured out the source of the issue yet, and it is very infrequent and preventable. There is a possibility that the OC edition of the card I have is slightly unstable in those conditions, causing the crashes.
The only thing I would warn you about is that there is a fair bit of set-up necessary to get ROCm working. Just make sure you have the right packages, and that the ROCm version is set correctly in the environment. My card requires me to override the variable to get it working, like so:
export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0Thanks! GPU crashes worry me a bit, because they’re hard to diagnose, but if it’s only in niche things like that, it’s probably fine. I will probably need 16 GB of VRAM since I’m mostly interested with experimenting on LMs, and maybe MusicGen, which are a bit bigger than SD.