I have currently a RX 6700XT and I’m quite happy with it when it comes to gaming and regular desktop usage, but was recently doing some local ML stuff and was just made aware of huge gap NVIDIA has over AMD in that space.

But yeah, going back to NVIDIA (I used to run 1080) after going AMD… seems kinda dirty for me ;-; Was very happy to move to AMD and be finally be free from the walled garden.

I thought at first to just buy a second GPU and still use my 6700XT for gaming and just use NVIDIA for ML, but unfortunately my motherboard doesn’t have 2 PCIe slots I could use for GPUs, so I need to choose. I would be able to buy used RTX 3090 for a fair price, since I don’t want to go for current gen, because of the current pricing.

So my question is how is NVIDIA nowadays? I specifically mean Wayland compatibility, since I just recently switched and would suck to go back to Xorg. Other than that, are there any hurdles, issues, annoyances, or is it smooth and seamless nowadays? Would you upgrade in my case?

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
    0·
    8 months ago

    What sort of ML tasks exactly, and is it personal or professional?

    If it’s for LLMs then you can just use Petals.

    If it’s for SD / image generation, there are two ways you can go about it: rent a GPU cloud service like vast.ai or runpod.io, vagon.io etc, then run SD on the PC/gpu you’re renting. It’s relativelt cheap, generate as much as you want in the duration you’ve rented. Last I checked, the prices were something like ~0.33 USD per hour, which is a far cheaper option than buying a top-end nVidia card for casual workloads.

    Another option is using a website/service where SD’s UI is presented to you and you usually generate images through a credit system. Buy X amount of credits and you can generate X amount of images etc. Eg sites like Rundiffusion, dreamlike.art, seek.art, lexica etc.

    Finally, there are plenty of free Google collabs for SD. And there is also stable horde, uses distributed computing for SD, with an easy WebUI called ArtBot.

    So yeah, there’s plenty of options these days depending on what you want to do, you no longer need to actually own an nVidia card.