I'm now tied to CUDA, but I didn't need to be. I was starting from scratch.
The longer before AMD can ship something which actually works, the more entrenched NVidia+CUDA become.
At this point, I lost hope.
- I found out I could only use it for compute headless. WTF?!?!?! (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-ROCm-Non-GUI). If it was driving a monitor, my machine would crash hard. There wasn't even an error message.
- A lot of other stuff didn't work and just resulted in odd crashes, or worse performance than CPU. I don't know why.
- Within 9 months, AMD discontinued support for my card. I raised this as a warranty issue (suitability for advertised purpose), but that obviously would go nowhere without a lawsuit. I had a very expensive brick.
- AMD support channels were non-existent. There literally was no way to reach anyone.
I bought an NVidia card, and it's been working well ever since.
ROCm is not well-supported because it's absolute garbage. You have *less* work reinventing wheels, since it's been invented once. You have more work to get community support and network effects, since you're starting out behind. Fundamentally, though, that can't start to happen if your system doesn't work at all.
I agree with you they're trying, but they're trying incompetently.
If ROCm was half the speed of CUDA, and wasn't integrating into the latest-greatest frameworks, but it was stable and working, I'd make it work. It wasn't anywhere close to stable and working.