AMD ROCm 4.5 Drops “Polaris” Architecture Support

AMD’s ROCm compute programming platform—a competitor to NVIDIA’s CUDA, dropped support for the “Polaris” graphics architecture, with the latest version 4.5 update. Users on the official ROCm git raised this as an issue assuming it was a bug, to which an official AMD support handle confirmed that the Radeon RX 480 graphics card of the original poster is no longer supported. Another user tested his “Polaris 20” based RX 570, and it isn’t supported, either. It’s conceivable that the “Polaris 30” based RX 590, a GPU launched in November 2018, isn’t supported either. Cutting out a 3-year old graphics architecture from the compute platform sends the wrong message, especially to CUDA users who AMD wants to win over with ROCm. With contemporary GPUs priced out of reach, IT students are left with used older-generation graphics cards, such as those based on “Polaris.” NVIDIA CUDA supports GPUs as far back as “Maxwell” (September 2014).