[PC Games] AMD ROCm Comes To Windows On Consumer GPUs

[Jennie Kim,]

AMD(opens in new tab) has shared two big news for the ROCm community. Not only is the ROCm SDK coming to Windows, but AMD has extended support to the company's consumer Radeon products, which are among the best graphics cards. Of course, there are some small compromises, but mainstream Radeon graphics card owners can experiment with AMD ROCm (5.6.0 Alpha), a software stack previously only available with professional graphics cards.

AMD introduced Radeon Open Compute Ecosystem (ROCm) in 2016 as an open-source alternative to Nvidia's CUDA platform. ROCm supports AMD's CDNA and RDNA GPU architectures, but the list is reduced to a select number of SKUs from AMD's Instinct and Radeon Pro lineups. AMD graphics card owners have gotten other SKUs to work, but they often only do so to a certain extent.From the Instinct portfolio, we have the Instinct MI250X, MI250, MI210, MI100, and MI50 that feature full support. Meanwhile, only the Radeon Pro W6800 and Radeon Pro V620 from the Radeon Pro's ranks are on the list. AMD has broadened the list to support the Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6600, and, surprisingly, the eight-year-old Radeon R9 Fury. However, there is a small catch. Only the Radeon R9 Fury arrives with full software-level support from the ROCm platform, whereas the other two RDNA 2 offerings have partial support. For instance, the Radeon RX 6900 XT only supports the Heterogeneous Interface for Portability (HIP) SDK; meanwhile, only the HIP runtime is enabled on the Radeon RX 6600.

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