AMD GPU support as standard - 7000 series announcement

[martinkeat]

As we all know, using the Nvidia plugin there's great support for NVIDIA GPU's for transcoding et al. However, support for AMD has been, shall we say, rather sketchy.

 

I have been going through all of the announcements from AMD on their new 7000 series CPU's and it transpires that the ENTIRE range are all APU's with onboard graphics. Considering the base range outstrips the 11700K from intel the AMD 7000 series is very shortly going to be popping up with home unraid servers in quick succession, and considering the conference call I listened into for NVIDIA shareholders where they openly admitted to intentionally reducing manufacturing to artificially inflate price due to demand outstripping supply (and a certain company terminating its partnership with Nvidia), I have a feeling that AMD GPUs are also going to be more popular in the coming months and years. 

 

For all of this and more, I'd like to formally put it to the community to support, and to the unraid team to move forward with trying to make AMD drivers and integration to docker etc, a standard feature in the next release either by official plugin, or as standard with unraid itself. An AMD 7000 CPU with APU capabilities may well be a very attractive prospect for those building an unraid server particularly when it comes to things like plex or tdarr etc. 

 

All the best,

 

Martin

[ich777]

41 minutes ago, martinkeat said:

However, support for AMD has been, shall we say, rather sketchy.

But in general this has nothing to do with Unraid per se.

This is more an issue with the Docker containers, the maintainers of these containers or better speaking the creators of the application itself have to make sure that transcoding is working with their application and the maintainers from the containers have to make sure that they ship everything that is needed that transcoding is working regardleds if it's AMD, Intel or Nvidia.

 

43 minutes ago, martinkeat said:

For all of this and more, I'd like to formally put it to the community to support, and to the unraid team to move forward with trying to make AMD drivers and integration

That is already in place with the amdgpu Kernel module that ships with Unraid.

BTW AFAIK the new 7000 series is based on the RDNA2 architecture and should be supported OOB from the Unraid side or better speaking the Linux Kernel with the above mentioned amdgpu driver.

 

44 minutes ago, martinkeat said:

docker etc, a standard feature in the next release either by official plugin, or as standard with unraid itself.

Do you know that there is already the RadeonTOP plugin in the CA App which actually has the ability to show the usage of an AMD GPU on the Dashboard in combination with the GPU Statistics plugin like it is already possible with Nvidia and Intel?

 

I can only tell you that for example Emby and Jellyfin are both working fine with AMD GPUs regardless if we are talking about iGPUs or dGPUs, Plex on the other hand has some issues with HW transcoding but there are workarounds for this in place but this is something, as said above, that the container maintainer and the Plex team has to fix and make sure that they ship everything in the container what is needed to get AMD transcoding to work.

 

However if you ever want to try HW transcoding on AMD you only have to pass through the device /dev/dri to the container (as a device and not a path) in the template and you should be good to go - this is basically the same as if you use a Intel iGPU for transcoding.

 

 

At last I have to say something about that:

57 minutes ago, martinkeat said:

An AMD 7000 CPU with APU capabilities may well be a very attractive prospect for those building an unraid server particularly when it comes to things like plex or tdarr etc.

I'm really not too sure about this... For the things you mention, maybe yes...

 

But since AMD was or is simply a little behind in terms of virtualization, passthrough, C-States and not to forget about the CCX design (microstuttering in VMs) I would still recommend to use Intel chips if you want something that just works at least in terms for VMs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm also curious how these new chips perform and it is/was clearly a benefit that their platform at least support ECC OOB (which Intel doesn't do on the consumer chips).

I'm by far not an Intel fanboy because back in the days I was only on AMD because they delivered great price to performance and I'm always open to change my mind.

That said nobody knows how well they perform for transcoding and how cut down these chips are in terms of transcoding support (simultaneous transcodes, codecs,...).

I would recommend to wait until someone has such a chip on hand and post results for transcoding.

If you are curious enough to buy such a chip and try it for yourself please let us all know how they perform in terms of transcoding.

[iBoolGuy]

Hey @ich777,

Sorry for @ing out of the blue, I've been researching for hours how to enable transcoding on Plex using an AMD GPU.

 

On 9/28/2022 at 4:22 PM, ich777 said:

However if you ever want to try HW transcoding on AMD you only have to pass through the device /dev/dri to the container (as a device and not a path) in the template and you should be good to go - this is basically the same as if you use a Intel iGPU for transcoding.

 

You said it is possible 🥺please assist me I'm lost! (I asked chatgpt on Bing Im that desperate💀)

[ich777]

13 hours ago, iBoolGuy said:

Sorry for @ing out of the blue, I've been researching for hours how to enable transcoding on Plex using an AMD GPU.

That's an issue from Plex and you should report that on the Plex forums.

 

I don't know if it's still the same since then but I think so. AMD GPUs (at least recent ones) are supported and enabled on boot on Unraid. You only have to add the device /dev/dri in the template, as it is the case for Intel iGPUs and that's all.

 

You can transcoding with AMD on Jellyfin or Emby for sure (Jellyfin is free and open source).