AMD has introduced a driver version (Adrenalin Edition 23.5.2) for its graphics cards that not only offers performance and stability improvements for gamers: AMD explicitly emphasizes this time that the latest software version should also achieve a higher performance in Stable Diffusion.
That first makes us sit up and take notice, since generative AI applications have been considered Nvidia's home game so far, where other hardware providers usually only play in the second league.
Unfortunately, AMD does not provide a direct comparison with Nvidia in its press release - only a comparison with an earlier driver version is mentioned: "With the latest driver, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX with DirectML and the Microsoft Olive optimized version of Stable Diffusion 1.5 delivers on average 2x higher performance compared to the previous driver (23.5.1)."
There is a larger Stable Diffusion GPU comparison
at Tom's Hardware, but many general conditions do not match anymore. AMD refers to
Direct ML optimization for Microsoft's Olive, which also lets Nvidia cards calculate twice as fast.
Nevertheless, this topic is relevant because many users would rather choose AMD than Nvidia for AI applications because they usually find a much better price-performance ratio. Especially the graphics card memory, which is important for AI models, is currently very expensive for
Nvidia.
However, not even the actual performance is the problem so far, but the support of popular software packages in general. While almost every AI model is based on Nvidia's CUDA, AMD's alternative (ROCm) seems to have been looking for the connection for years.
However, all this could now also change quickly. Not only has AMD multiplied the number of ROCm developers in the last two years, but the associated
GitHub repository has also been bustling for a few months.
And AMD wants to announce big things about its own AI strategy on June 13. We personally expect the first direct benchmarks with comparisons to Nvidia here - which will still be "cherry picked", of course. Nevertheless, a second player besides Nvidia is certainly desirable for a healthy market balance.