Third Party Hardware > GPU Compute / Accelerators

GPU options as of December 2021

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Woof:
What's the latest options I have for a GPU for my Talos II? I've a spare Radeon Pro W5700, which I'll try once my mobo and CPUs arrive from Raptor, but if I don't want to spend all my time tinkering, what are my current options? I can still pick up a WX7100 over here (Switzerland) but I'm loath to spend 700 on such an old card (then again, since I want to use my system and not spend all my time getting it running, is it still the best out-of-the-box choice).

I realise AMD is where it's at and the retired RTX 6000s I can grab from work will be of no use.

MPC7500:
Navi10/ 14 should work. Depending on the model. If you have a W5700 I would try this first. Navi 21/ 22/ 23 won't work for now.

lepidotos:
It seems to me like the best value for little endian is an RX 470 or 570, a used one on eBay goes for rougly $200 to about $250. More than enough power for desktop and video stuff, and still plenty powerful for 3D graphics and the few video games that are currently available for POWER. For just desktop stuff, again without needing BE support, an HD 8490 is like $20 and seems like it should suffice for desktop acceleration and video streaming.

If you're a big-endian die-hard, an HD 6970 is pretty much the cream of the crop according to my digging. An HD 6990 might work but it's only generally competitive with the 6970 (and on par with a 6950 without Crossfire) for a hugely higher power draw. Of course, previous gen cards from that should work too, but I'd definitely say that with how inexpensive the 6970 is (I see them going on the 'Bay for $120 or less), there's really no reason to pick anything else.

If you want to try Nvidia... good luck. The only experience I have with PPC Nvidia is with the iMac G5's FX Go5200 (which, granted, is an already awful video card gimped even further in the name of thermals), and it's a terrible experience, unable to smoothly perform with even a single program on the desktop even with IceWM. IIRC, the 20 series and up (and who knows how many generations prior) is only able to function as a math coprocessor as of late.

I'm looking forward to something based on Libre SOC. Especially if it gives more BE graphics options in the future.

Woof:
I have spare RX580 and W5700 cards to try with. And for the full PPC Nvidia experience I have a Quadro FX4500 from a Quad G5, but I'll stick with the AMD cards!

chatcannon:
I have a W5500 which will probably have similar compatibility issues with a W5700.

Firmware is "amdgpu/navi14*.bin". When I started out I had some issues with some firmware releases being incompatible but every firmware revision since ~~ October 2021 has worked.

Linux kernel 5.15 does not work but 5.10 (compiled with 4k pages) does.

The Fedora 34 installer live CD (and a system installed to disk from that live CD without enabling network access so it used the same kernel and not an upgraded one) was able to use the GPU despite being 64k pages, but I haven't found any other 64k setup that gets the GPU working.

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