that is fast this GPU has four NVMe ssds on it it's a
trick that AMD pulled to make the PCI Express slot go a little further than it
usually does meet the Radeon Pro SSG the world's first graphics card with storage
but this came out five years ago and it's still the only graphics card with
storage so how the heck does it work and
why didn't this take off first I'll take off to talk about our sponsor smart
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foreign
on the surface the Radeon Pro SSG is nothing special basically a Vega 64 with
double the hbm2 memory but if we take off the cooler we can get a look at its
real party trick look at that GPU business in the front
SSD party in the back these guys are
literally 2280 m.2 NVMe ssds Samsung OEM
each is 512 gigs and each shows up separately in Windows although the
default setup is a Windows Dynamic disk stripe which is effectively a two
terabyte raid zero so it's super cool but uh what will we use it for
sequential and random rights are far beyond even our PCI Express Gen 4 SSD
thanks to the 16 Lanes of PCI Express bandwidth available to the storage even
though I can only use gen 3 speeds but only sequential reads scale this way and
random reads are far slower than our Gen 4 SSD my best guess for why is that
unless there's something wrong with the ssds on the card read operations might
Simply Be redirecting through the GPU itself which is increasing request
latency and therefore reducing throughput for random but not for
sequential reads testing latency with performance tests lends credibility to
that assumption but hey since the data is going through the GPU anyway this
kind of reminds me of Microsoft's direct storage API which enables an NVMe SSD to
load data directly to the GPU instead of going through the CPU first now will we
see a performance Improvement then if we run games straight off of the SSG let's
give it a shot I've got F1 2021 installed on both the internal SSD and
the SSG itself so we'll see now if there's any
Improvement whatsoever give me a sec I gotta we got an Ethernet cable
as it turns out data loaded from the SSG is still processed by the CPU unless
it's using AMD's SSG API so we're in fact losing some performance due to the
SSD array and GPU sharing bandwidth what
a missed opportunity as for the API itself well maybe we can test that out
when the SSG first launched AMD touted its ability to work with massive data
sets and well yeah two terabytes is massive but unfortunately for AMD
massive data sets that benefit from a direct connection to the GPU like this
are not super common the example they came up with was running 8K raw footage
in real time off of the ssg's internal storage and they helpfully created a
sample video player to handle exactly that it requires processing the video
files with ffmpeg first to decompress the raw video frames so we'll do that
now open the terminal here I've already
converted the files and yes
what okay let's try directly off of the SSG
hmm I've tried everything I can think of at this point from running the player
itself off of the SSG storage to compiling it myself same thing always
happens looks like something changed between the time they wrote it and today
and this whole thing is just broken now seeing as the original SDK was already
tough to find let alone find an updated version you can guess it wasn't too
popular unlike our brand new cable ties at ltdstore.com check this out we've got
15 new colors there is one Ray of Hope For Us Adobe
added support for it in Premiere Pro back in 2018 and as far as I can tell
they're the only ones so let's run Puget bench's 8K red test and see what we get
alright so this is straight off of the SSD
I'm just gonna run the live playback 8K
and this will take a few minutes oh Adobe why are you so slow
success look at that playback is 6 nearly 69 times nicer than running from
our Gen 4 SSD and all I did was copy files to the SSG mind you it's still not
full speed we're looking at less than 10 FPS at full AK res and less than seven
at half res but that's way better than
the less than one FPS we got before it freaking works but why did AMD think to
do something like this in the first place the Radeon Pro SSG is a solution
to a uniquely 2017 problem NVIDIA had the quadro p6000 a GPU with 24 gigs of
gddr5x memory AMD wanted to make a card with even more memory to compete but
dram prices were going through the roof at the time and vram prices weren't far
behind their then New Vegas 64 graphics cards launched in August bringing with
them eight gigabytes of HPM to memory so you might think well how about just
expanding that well that's tough because hpm2 is connected via ridiculously wide
2048-bit memory bus so not only is it
very expensive per giga bite it's also very difficult to scale it without
making the Silicon itself much larger to accommodate the extra direct connections
to the GPU enter solid state Graphics
man Flash the stuff that ssds are made of may not be nearly as fast but it's
pretty affordable compared to vram with Radeon SSG AMD now had a whole two
terabytes of memory to work with your move NVIDIA or actually
our move
and they even have standard phillips screws although they're not ferrous I
can't pick it up with a magnetic tip oh well yeah it just comes right out
and a new one goes right on in now this
is tricky because it doesn't have a magnetic
properties but then it goes all right one down
three to go there we're done
this is hilarious you run your system without out any
additional storage as long as you're okay with the overhead of sharing bandwidth with a GPU that's not its
intended purpose of course putting the ssds so close to the GPU means that like
with Microsoft's direct storage API it doesn't have to go through the CPU or
really any other part of the system if it's loading via the API straight to the
GPU get subscribed by the way because the minute Microsoft gives us something
to test direct storage with we are on it this Arrangement tremendously speeds up
access times which is a crucial component to anything a GPU does which
is why it's such a Hot Topic today even the high band with cache controller AMD
included on the Vega gpus that allows them to extend vram with main system
memory is slow since it has to go through the CPU first as we've seen the
SSG concept is sound but only in a world where that much memory is necessary only
in a world where people are willing to use the API and most unfortunately for
AMD in 2017 only in a world where people work in 8k raw and are not used using a
lower resolution proxy Clips especially considering it was rocking Vega 64 specs
alongside an asking price of seven thousand dollars when it was new
although it quickly fell to 4 600 a few months after release because it's such a
niche within a niche within a niche use case I haven't been able to find any
examples of it being used in the real world but let's say demand for this
feature does come back well the promise of direct storage doing basically the
same thing makes this Arrangement costly and inefficient I mean there's no reason
DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Creative Cloud couldn't use direct storage if games can
to its credit you're getting a lot of m.2 slots and a GPU all in one package
but the bridge chip and controller Hardware do not come cheap and you're
giving up bandwidth whenever the SSD is accessed by something that's not using
the API the Radeon Pro SSG is truly a
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
piece of kit that has questionable practicality it's a good one