Looking at images of the card, I noticed it’s only PCIe X8. As it’s based on the AMD RX540 GPU it should have Linux support so chances are it’ll fit your use case. By the looks of it it’s not overly expensive, so worth a try. Keep the RX480 at least for a while, in case it doesn’t work out.
I am running WX 3100 with dual 4k@60 displays on Arch. And I can check some things. (Ryzen 3700x - so no secondary APU)
clinfo on mesa-opencl (amdgpu driver):
Number of platforms 1
Platform Name Clover
Platform Vendor Mesa
Platform Version OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 21.2.3
Platform Profile FULL_PROFILE
Platform Extensions cl_khr_icd
Platform Extensions function suffix MESA
Platform Name Clover
Number of devices 1
Device Name AMD Radeon Pro WX3100 (POLARIS12, DRM 3.41.0, 5.13.13-arch1-1, LLVM 12.0.1)
Device Vendor AMD
Device Vendor ID 0x1002
Device Version OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 21.2.3
Device Numeric Version 0x401000 (1.1.0)
Driver Version 21.2.3
Device OpenCL C Version OpenCL C 1.1
Device Type GPU
Device Profile FULL_PROFILE
Device Available Yes
Compiler Available Yes
Max compute units 8
Max clock frequency 1219MHz
Max work item dimensions 3
Max work item sizes 256x256x256
Max work group size 256
Preferred work group size multiple (kernel) 64
Preferred / native vector sizes
char 16 / 16
short 8 / 8
int 4 / 4
long 2 / 2
half 0 / 0 (n/a)
float 4 / 4
double 2 / 2 (cl_khr_fp64)
Half-precision Floating-point support (n/a)
Single-precision Floating-point support (core)
Denormals No
Infinity and NANs Yes
Round to nearest Yes
Round to zero No
Round to infinity No
IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add No
Support is emulated in software No
Correctly-rounded divide and sqrt operations No
Double-precision Floating-point support (cl_khr_fp64)
Denormals Yes
Infinity and NANs Yes
Round to nearest Yes
Round to zero Yes
Round to infinity Yes
IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add Yes
Support is emulated in software No
Address bits 64, Little-Endian
Global memory size 4294967296 (4GiB)
Error Correction support No
Max memory allocation 3435973836 (3.2GiB)
Unified memory for Host and Device No
Minimum alignment for any data type 128 bytes
Alignment of base address 32768 bits (4096 bytes)
Global Memory cache type None
Image support No
Local memory type Local
Local memory size 32768 (32KiB)
Max number of constant args 16
Max constant buffer size 67108864 (64MiB)
Max size of kernel argument 1024
Queue properties
Out-of-order execution No
Profiling Yes
Profiling timer resolution 0ns
Execution capabilities
Run OpenCL kernels Yes
Run native kernels No
ILs with version (n/a)
Built-in kernels with version (n/a)
Device Extensions cl_khr_byte_addressable_store cl_khr_global_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_global_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_int64_base_atomics cl_khr_int64_extended_atomics cl_khr_fp64 cl_khr_extended_versioning
Device Extensions with Version cl_khr_byte_addressable_store 0x400000 (1.0.0)
cl_khr_global_int32_base_atomics 0x400000 (1.0.0)
cl_khr_global_int32_extended_atomics 0x400000 (1.0.0)
cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics 0x400000 (1.0.0)
cl_khr_local_int32_extended_atomics 0x400000 (1.0.0)
cl_khr_int64_base_atomics 0x400000 (1.0.0)
cl_khr_int64_extended_atomics 0x400000 (1.0.0)
cl_khr_fp64 0x400000 (1.0.0)
cl_khr_extended_versioning 0x400000 (1.0.0)
NULL platform behavior
clGetPlatformInfo(NULL, CL_PLATFORM_NAME, ...) Clover
clGetDeviceIDs(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL, ...) Success [MESA]
clCreateContext(NULL, ...) [default] Success [MESA]
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_DEFAULT) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name AMD Radeon Pro WX3100 (POLARIS12, DRM 3.41.0, 5.13.13-arch1-1, LLVM 12.0.1)
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CPU) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_GPU) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name AMD Radeon Pro WX3100 (POLARIS12, DRM 3.41.0, 5.13.13-arch1-1, LLVM 12.0.1)
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ACCELERATOR) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CUSTOM) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name AMD Radeon Pro WX3100 (POLARIS12, DRM 3.41.0, 5.13.13-arch1-1, LLVM 12.0.1)
ICD loader properties
ICD loader Name OpenCL ICD Loader
ICD loader Vendor OCL Icd free software
ICD loader Version 2.3.1
ICD loader Profile OpenCL 3.0
Can’t really tell much on the browser front since linux browsers’ GPU video acceleration is spotty - I can’t be sure if I the WX3100 doesn’t support some specific form or it’s just browser support. (I see high cpu usage when playing for example 4k youtube which could indicate software decoding)
But I can verify what is supported on api/player level:
And I got a smooth playback with MPV declaring vaapi hardware decoding.
I run lots of tabs/browser windows and I found no issues on performance side but I am sometimes seeing jubmled frame-buffer on a browser popup window. It’s just within that popup window and interacting with it fixes it immedietely (hover/move/click/etc.)
You might also want to check out the WX 3200. I was told that the WX cards (specifically 3100, actually) was finicky on Linux from a few people on the r/VFIO discord a while back so I was initially skeptical, but it has totally been fine for me with the regular amdgpu driver. It’s currently what I’m using under Arch (and I believe it’s been over a year now, maybe 2) to drive one 1080p and one 1440p display. I even use it for less graphics intensive games with Steam Play as well. (Minecraft works fine, too.)
Recently, I moved to using my Linux desktop as a VM and thus have also started to passthrough that GPU as well, and it seems to have reset fine on regular VM shutdowns/starts when I went to change some VM settings (but it’s not very common that I turn the Linux VM off anyway). There was one time when I was first starting to experiment with passing it through where I force stopped the VM and couldn’t reuse the GPU until restarting the host, though, but I don’t remember the specific steps that led to that situation.
Thank you all for the info, much appreciated and informative. Looks like 3100 would do the job just great for everything I need. Also checked Firefox, and yeah, looks like I’m CPU decoding video anyways. GPU prices being what they are, I’ve also found a 2100, which is supposed to be a 3100 with half the RAM. Looking at the radeontop I’m apparently well below 1GB usage for my desktop.
In theory, the 2100 should be just fine enough also, and considerably cheaper. Think I’m gonna give it a shot and get the 3100 if it doesn’t work out.
Yup, the prices are crazy, went with 2100 for ~ $80, and hopefully it works out. Otherwise I’m probably gonna shelf this idea till the prices normalize a bit.
Welp, what can I say. The WX 2100 works just fine, can’t complain. Now if I only paid attention to the fact that it comes without a full length bracket… Oh well. There’s a fix for that too.
