Probably not, since the FahCore was designed to work with OpenCL Version X.XX. Then it's AMD's (or NVidia's) responsibility to deliver drivers that work with whatever the software can throw at it. Moreover, if the model successfully worked successfully with Driver version Y.YY and fails to work with version (Y.YY+1) that would seem to imply that when the drivers were optimized to work better with some new games, that additional OpenCL bugs were introduced that were not caught by driver testing.somata wrote:Does that not imply the current AMD projects are using a (possibly severely) simplified model, one that fits within the current limitations of AMD's OpenCL platform? So simple, it would seem, that despite having >1 PFLOPS available for the platform nobody bothers to run new projects on it because the results are... less than desired?bruce wrote:Based on forum reports, there have been several recent revisions of AMD drivers which have contained bugs that interfere with the reliable use of OpenCL for AMD GPUs. Until AMD resolves those issues, there's little incentive for a researcher to release new projects for AMD.
It should also be noted that new drivers must be tested on ALL operating systems. Just because an OpenCL core works on Windows 7 (32-bit), that doesn't prove it will work on Ubuntu or on Windows7 (64-bit). Providing dependable drivers is a time-consuming (and expensive) process and there is always a natural conflict with the ever-present pressures to cut costs.
NVidia spent a lot of money developing CUDA and ATI did not. That turns out to have been a wise decision on NVidia's part. In many respects, CUDA and OpenCL are very similar with maybe 90% of the internal code being identical. I predict that they will always keep maybe 10% of extra features to maintain the competitive advantage that they gained from their investment in a proprietary language. (Maybe its 80/20, not 90/10.) As long as the FahCore doesn't use those extra 10-20% of features, it's very easy to convert a FahCore between CUDA and OpenCL and there's a strong reason to believe that if CUDA works, the OpenCL core will too.somata wrote:I guess it's just a shame that Nvidia had to get everyone hooked on CUDA instead of endorsing an open standard like OpenCL. Ok, so it appears there are problems with AMD's OpenCL drivers, but what about Nvidia's? When GPU3 was introduced I had hoped there would be "one core to rule them all" based on OpenCL and it would run seamlessly on either platform. That way PG's attention could be focused on maintaining as few cores as possible. But nooo, apparently GPGPU is still too immature to get correct behavior/good performance if you abstract too far from the hardware, so CUDA is still preferred on Nvidia, completely defeating the purpose of OpenCL.
I have not seen any recent announcements from PG about the direction of their GPU cores except that they're working on something that will be called FahCore_17. Whatever it turns out to be will not be released by OpenMM/PG until they're confident that it works with current drivers, whether that's NVidia or AMD or both, along with whatever version of OpenCL and/or CUDA that we will have at that point.