You also get UMR from AMD https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tomstdenis/umr

There is also a bunch of other tools provided: https://gpuopen.com/radeon-gpu-detective/ https://gpuopen.com/news/introducing-radeon-developer-tool-s...

It's like the 3rd sentence in the blog post.......

many don't know but you can use them without GPUs :)

AMD doesn't have a unified architecture across GPU and compute like nVidia.

AMD compute cards are sold under the Insinct line and are vastly more powerfull than their GPUs.

Supposedly, they are moving back to a unified architecture in the next generation of GPU cards.

[1] https://ramalama.ai/

Performance-wise, the 7900 xtx is still the most cost effective way of getting 24 gigabytes that isn't a sketchy VRAM mod. And VRAM is the main performance barrier since any LLM is going to barely fit in memory.

Highly suggest checking out TheRock. There's been a big rearchitecting of ROCm to improve the UX/quality.

But yes, when you're stumbling around a black screen, tooling is everything. Porting bits of shader code between syntaxes is the easy bit.

Can you get better tooling on Windows if you stick to DirectX rather than OpenGL?

I am writing compute shaders though, where one command buffer can run for seconds repeatedly processing over a 1GB buffer, and it seems the tools are heavily geared towards graphics work where the workload per frame is much lighter. (Will all the AI focus, hopefully they'll start addressing this use-case more).

Its probably awesome to use Metal and everything but the vendor lock-in sounds like an issue.

Have you tried RenderDoc for the OpenGL side? Afaik that's the equivalent of Xcode's debugger for Vulkan/OpenGL.

Is anyone here doing Metal compute shaders on iPad? Any tips?

I don't know, buying a ridiculously overpriced computer with the least relevant OS on it just to debug graphics code written in an API not usable anywhere else doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

For anyone who seriously does want to get into this stuff, just go with Windows (or Linux if you're tired of what Microsoft is turning Windows into, you can still write Win32 applications and just use VK for your rendering, or even DX12 but have it be translated, but then you have to debug VK code while using DX12), learn DX12 or Vulkan, use RenderDoc to help you out. It's not nearly as difficult as people make it seem.

If you've got time you can learn OpenGL (4.6) with DSA to get a bit of perspective why people might feel the lower-level APIs are tedious, but if you just want to get into graphics programming just learn DX12/VK and move on. It's a lower-level endeavor and that'll help you out in the long run anyway since you've got more control, better validation, and the drivers have less of a say in how things happen (trust me, you don't want the driver vendors to decide how things happen, especially Intel).

P.S.: I like Metal as an API; I think it's the closest any modern API got to OpenGL while still being acceptable in other ways (I think it has pretty meh API validation, though). The problem is really that they never exported the API so it's useless on the actual relevant platforms for games and real interactive graphics experiences.