The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

I just bought a used Ayaneo 2 handheld, it has an old(er) mobile RDNA 2 GPU and I was blown away by how well this thing performed under Linux. Almost everything (that's not a recent AAA game) runs beautiful and a lot faster/smoother than it does under Windows. The experience has been so good that I'm considering switching my main pc (with a 9070XT) to Linux as well.No doubt Timur contributed heavily to this given Valves Steamdeck (which uses a very similar but slower GPU).Given the current hardware prices it's pretty awesome to see someone squeezing maximum performance out of old hardware! reply: I'm sure Valve probably still deserves the credit, since the Steam Deck uses a RDNA 2 gpu, but the article mentions that Timur specifically worked on gcn1.0 GPUs - e.g. radeon HD 7800/7900 from 2012 (!)

Direct link to the talk, with timestamp: https://youtu.be/j5W5ErEMnvM?t=21385

Honestly, the folks writing inference drivers for Llama.cpp / GGML would sort of benefit from better compiler work like this.In general, Valve's work has been exceptional and supplementing AMD's own ROCM/OpenCL and Vulkan team, they've gotten a lot of defaults right and people should work together with Valve to improve support for their chips.

I wonder if some of these could carry over for LLM inference. It will be nice to turn more ewaste GPUs into capable processing units for LLM. reply: I have a Radeon RX 6900 XT (16 GB VRAM, originally released in 2021), and it's possible to run some lightweight models to have okayish performance and quality of output, but nothing I've tried has come anywhere close to the quality even of the models I can use for free from OpenCode Zen or the free tier of Openrouter. If you want to keep everything local on the same card I have, it requires putting up with a model that's noticeably worse in virtually every metric than what you can get for free elsewhere, and the GPUs this article are talking about are three times as old as mine.It would be awesome if someone manages to figure out how to get small enough models to fit on older cards to be viable, but I'm not optimistic that it will come without some sort of fundamental architectural innovation rather than incremental improvements, and it's not clear if and when that will happen.