AMD Clarifies Pro Driver Support for Radeon VII

Yesterday, we, and other media outlets, reported that AMD's Radeon Pro drivers, which are normally exclusive to their pricey professional GPUs, would support AMD's consumer-oriented Radeon VII graphics card. But the level of support wasn't exactly clear, as the driver notes were vague and didn't even mention Radeon VII by name. Today, AMD sent the Reddit user TrueMantle an email, along with a chart, showing just what software features the new GPU will support with pro drivers. In a nutshell, workstation application optimizations and certifications don't apply to Radeon VII (or any regular Radeon GPU) running on the pro drivers. Thanks to TechPowerUp for spotting the post.

I posted the chart here.

Coming directly from AMD (via mail): "Clarification: AMD provides the same driver support to Radeon VII that is available on other Radeon consumer hardware as listed in the table below. To be specific, workstation performance, application certifications, and features do not apply to Radeon consumer hardware when using Radeon Pro Software. The explicit purpose of our "One Driver" program is to simplify implementation for businesses that use Radeon consumer and Radeon Pro products across their install base."

Sounds good.... I mean really. Considering the VII is around 1000 bucks cheaper I would say people will be fine with this. I'm not sure the "workstation optimiazations" are that big a deal... for sure there not worth 3x the purchase price.

I am a bit slow to this, are they still going to have separate consumer drivers for the rest of us? I am not sure I like the one driver for all concept, drivers are already getting bloated. Having worked a few graphics shops in the past, I was just fine with separate drivers. I guess for the average layman it might make it easier...

I was under the impression that the Radeon VII had almost no driver support of any kind.

NoOther said:

I am a bit slow to this, are they still going to have separate consumer drivers for the rest of us? I am not sure I like the one driver for all concept, drivers are already getting bloated. Having worked a few graphics shops in the past, I was just fine with separate drivers. I guess for the average layman it might make it easier...

Click to expand...

To my understanding, the "One Driver" initiative is for Pro Drivers to simplify the drivers for business users. If you've got a mix of consumer level and workstation level GPUs deployed, then you have to differentiate between the Pro level and consumer level (Radeon gaming) drivers. With this, you should be able to use the Pro level drivers on all GPUs whether consumer or workstation. Sure, you won't get the perks that come with workstation GPUs, but it makes things simpler to manage from a driver deployment perspective. Afaik, it's not even offered publicly and has to be requested by companies who want to try it out. I highly doubt that it'll be replacing the Radeon gaming drivers any time soon and will likely just be an option that is taken mostly by larger companies.

*edit* From the Reddit post, quoting the AMD rep: "The explicit purpose of our “One Driver” program is to simplify implementation for businesses that use Radeon consumer and Radeon Pro products across their install base.”

I wonder if they allow 10bit color in Photoshop....right now it is only Quadro and AMD Pro Cards

This is a bummer. Programs like solid-works work much better on "enterprise" certified hardware. Basically the more expensive hardware. Not much experiance with this on the AMD side, but I had a 1080TI and an older less memory Quadro card put up against each other for solid-works usage and the quadro card always performed much better. Basically all driver control. So we had better hardware that would not run the program as well as older hardware with less memory and horsepower. Hope AMD was going to change this, but it looks like they are going to continue to model of trying to price enterprise customers at a much higher rate.