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that is fast this GPU has four NVMe ssds on it it's a

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trick that AMD pulled to make the PCI Express slot go a little further than it

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usually does meet the Radeon Pro SSG the world's first graphics card with storage

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but this came out five years ago and it's still the only graphics card with

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storage so how the heck does it work and

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why didn't this take off first I'll take off to talk about our sponsor smart

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foreign

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on the surface the Radeon Pro SSG is nothing special basically a Vega 64 with

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double the hbm2 memory but if we take off the cooler we can get a look at its

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real party trick look at that GPU business in the front

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SSD party in the back these guys are

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literally 2280 m.2 NVMe ssds Samsung OEM

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each is 512 gigs and each shows up separately in Windows although the

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default setup is a Windows Dynamic disk stripe which is effectively a two

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terabyte raid zero so it's super cool but uh what will we use it for

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sequential and random rights are far beyond even our PCI Express Gen 4 SSD

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thanks to the 16 Lanes of PCI Express bandwidth available to the storage even

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though I can only use gen 3 speeds but only sequential reads scale this way and

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random reads are far slower than our Gen 4 SSD my best guess for why is that

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unless there's something wrong with the ssds on the card read operations might

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Simply Be redirecting through the GPU itself which is increasing request

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latency and therefore reducing throughput for random but not for

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sequential reads testing latency with performance tests lends credibility to

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that assumption but hey since the data is going through the GPU anyway this

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kind of reminds me of Microsoft's direct storage API which enables an NVMe SSD to

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load data directly to the GPU instead of going through the CPU first now will we

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see a performance Improvement then if we run games straight off of the SSG let's

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give it a shot I've got F1 2021 installed on both the internal SSD and

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the SSG itself so we'll see now if there's any

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Improvement whatsoever give me a sec I gotta we got an Ethernet cable

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as it turns out data loaded from the SSG is still processed by the CPU unless

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it's using AMD's SSG API so we're in fact losing some performance due to the

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SSD array and GPU sharing bandwidth what

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a missed opportunity as for the API itself well maybe we can test that out

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when the SSG first launched AMD touted its ability to work with massive data

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sets and well yeah two terabytes is massive but unfortunately for AMD

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massive data sets that benefit from a direct connection to the GPU like this

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are not super common the example they came up with was running 8K raw footage

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in real time off of the ssg's internal storage and they helpfully created a

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sample video player to handle exactly that it requires processing the video

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files with ffmpeg first to decompress the raw video frames so we'll do that

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now open the terminal here I've already

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converted the files and yes

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what okay let's try directly off of the SSG

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hmm I've tried everything I can think of at this point from running the player

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itself off of the SSG storage to compiling it myself same thing always

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happens looks like something changed between the time they wrote it and today

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and this whole thing is just broken now seeing as the original SDK was already

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tough to find let alone find an updated version you can guess it wasn't too

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popular unlike our brand new cable ties at ltdstore.com check this out we've got

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15 new colors there is one Ray of Hope For Us Adobe

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added support for it in Premiere Pro back in 2018 and as far as I can tell

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they're the only ones so let's run Puget bench's 8K red test and see what we get

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alright so this is straight off of the SSD

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I'm just gonna run the live playback 8K

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and this will take a few minutes oh Adobe why are you so slow

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success look at that playback is 6 nearly 69 times nicer than running from

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our Gen 4 SSD and all I did was copy files to the SSG mind you it's still not

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full speed we're looking at less than 10 FPS at full AK res and less than seven

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at half res but that's way better than

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the less than one FPS we got before it freaking works but why did AMD think to

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do something like this in the first place the Radeon Pro SSG is a solution

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to a uniquely 2017 problem NVIDIA had the quadro p6000 a GPU with 24 gigs of

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gddr5x memory AMD wanted to make a card with even more memory to compete but

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dram prices were going through the roof at the time and vram prices weren't far

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behind their then New Vegas 64 graphics cards launched in August bringing with

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them eight gigabytes of HPM to memory so you might think well how about just

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expanding that well that's tough because hpm2 is connected via ridiculously wide

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2048-bit memory bus so not only is it

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very expensive per giga bite it's also very difficult to scale it without

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making the Silicon itself much larger to accommodate the extra direct connections

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to the GPU enter solid state Graphics

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man Flash the stuff that ssds are made of may not be nearly as fast but it's

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pretty affordable compared to vram with Radeon SSG AMD now had a whole two

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terabytes of memory to work with your move NVIDIA or actually

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our move

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and they even have standard phillips screws although they're not ferrous I

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can't pick it up with a magnetic tip oh well yeah it just comes right out

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and a new one goes right on in now this

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is tricky because it doesn't have a magnetic

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properties but then it goes all right one down

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three to go there we're done

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this is hilarious you run your system without out any

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additional storage as long as you're okay with the overhead of sharing bandwidth with a GPU that's not its

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intended purpose of course putting the ssds so close to the GPU means that like

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with Microsoft's direct storage API it doesn't have to go through the CPU or

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really any other part of the system if it's loading via the API straight to the

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GPU get subscribed by the way because the minute Microsoft gives us something

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to test direct storage with we are on it this Arrangement tremendously speeds up

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access times which is a crucial component to anything a GPU does which

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is why it's such a Hot Topic today even the high band with cache controller AMD

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included on the Vega gpus that allows them to extend vram with main system

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memory is slow since it has to go through the CPU first as we've seen the

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SSG concept is sound but only in a world where that much memory is necessary only

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in a world where people are willing to use the API and most unfortunately for

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AMD in 2017 only in a world where people work in 8k raw and are not used using a

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lower resolution proxy Clips especially considering it was rocking Vega 64 specs

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alongside an asking price of seven thousand dollars when it was new

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although it quickly fell to 4 600 a few months after release because it's such a

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niche within a niche within a niche use case I haven't been able to find any

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examples of it being used in the real world but let's say demand for this

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feature does come back well the promise of direct storage doing basically the

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same thing makes this Arrangement costly and inefficient I mean there's no reason

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DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Creative Cloud couldn't use direct storage if games can

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to its credit you're getting a lot of m.2 slots and a GPU all in one package

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but the bridge chip and controller Hardware do not come cheap and you're

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giving up bandwidth whenever the SSD is accessed by something that's not using

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the API the Radeon Pro SSG is truly a

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product of its time and I doubt we'll see such a beast again

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check out our recent video on the NVIDIA a100 for another example of a high-end

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piece of kit that has questionable practicality it's a good one