 That is fast! This GPU has four NVMe SSDs on it. It's a trick that AMD pulled to make the PCI Express slot go a little further than it usually does. Meet the Radeon Pro SSG, the world's first graphics card with storage. But this came out five years ago, and it's still the only graphics card with storage. So, how the heck does it work, and why didn't this take off? First, I'll take off to talk about our sponsor, SmartDeploy. Zero touch, zero headache, PC management for IT. Deploy Windows images, apps, and drivers from the cloud. No VPN required. Get your free subscription worth over $500 at smartdeploy.com slash linus. On the surface, the Radeon Pro SSG is nothing special. Basically a Vega 64 with double the HBM2 memory. But, if we take off the cooler, we can get a look at its real party trick. Haha! Look at that. GPU business in the front, SSD party in the back. These guys are literally 2280 M.2 NVMe SSDs, Samsung OEM. Each is 512 gigs, and each shows up separately in Windows. Although the default setup is a Windows Dynamic Disk Stripe, which is effectively a 2TB Rade Zero. So it's super cool, but what will we use it for? Sequential and random writes are far beyond even our PCI Express Gen 4 SSD, thanks to the 16 lanes of PCI Express bandwidth available to the storage, even though it can only use Gen 3 speeds. But, only sequential reads scale this way, and random reads are far slower than our Gen 4 SSD. My best guess for why is that unless there's something wrong with the SSDs on the card, read operations might simply be redirecting through the GPU itself, which is increasing request latency and therefore reducing throughput for random, but not for sequential reads. Testing latency with performance tests lends credibility to that assumption. But hey, since the data is going through the GPU anyway, this kind of reminds me of Microsoft's DirectStorage API, which enables an NVMe SSD to load data directly to the GPU instead of going through the CPU first. Now, will we see a performance improvement then if we run games straight off of the SSG? Let's give it a shot. I've got F1 2021 installed on both the internal SSD and the SSG itself. So we'll see now if there's any improvement whatsoever. Give me a sec, I gotta get an ethernet cable. As it turns out, data loaded from the SSG is still processed by the CPU, unless it's using AMD's SSG API. So we're in fact losing some performance due to the SSD array and GPU sharing bandwidth. What a missed opportunity. As for the API itself, well, maybe we can test that out. When the SSG first launched, AMD touted its ability to work with massive data sets. And well, yeah, two terabytes is massive. But unfortunately for AMD, massive data sets that benefit from a direct connection to the GPU like this are not super common. The example they came up with was running 8K raw footage in real time off of the SSG's internal storage. And they helpfully created a sample video player to handle exactly that. It requires processing the video files with FFmpeg first to decompress the raw video frames. So we'll do that now. Open the terminal here. I've already converted the files. And yes. Yeah. What? OK. Let's try directly off of the SSG. Hmm. I've tried everything I can think of at this point from running the player itself off of the SSG storage to compiling it myself. Same thing always happens. Looks like something changed between the time they wrote it and today. And this whole thing is just broken now. Seeing as the original SDK was already tough to find, let alone find an updated version, you can guess it wasn't too popular. Unlike our brand new cable ties at LTDstore.com. Check this out. We've got 15 new colors. There is one ray of hope for us. Adobe added support for it in Premiere Pro back in 2018. And as far as I can tell, they're the only ones. So let's run Puget Bench's 8K Red Test and see what we get. All right. So this is straight off of the SSD. I'm just going to run the live playback 8K. This will take a few minutes. Oh, Adobe, why are you so slow? Success! Look at that. This is like a six to nearly 69 times nicer than running from our Gen 4 SSD. And all I did was copy files to the SSD. Mind you, it's still not full speed. We're looking at less than 10 FPS at full 8K res and less than 7 at half res. But that's way better than the less than 1 FPS we got before. It freaking works. But why did AMD think to do something like this in the first place? Nvidia Pro SSD is a solution to a uniquely 2017 problem. Nvidia had the Quadro P6000, a GPU with 24 gigs of GDDR5X memory. AMD wanted to make a card with even more memory to compete, but DRAM prices were going through the roof at the time and VRAM prices weren't far behind. Their then new Vega 64 graphics cards launched in August, bringing with them 8 gigabytes of HBM2 memory. So you might think, well, how about just expanding that? That's tough because HBM2 is connected via a ridiculously wide 2048-bit memory bus. So not only is it very expensive per gigabyte, it's also very difficult to scale it without making the silicon itself much larger to accommodate the extra direct connections to the GPU. Enter solid state graphics. NAND flash, the stuff that SSDs are made of, may not be nearly as fast, but it's pretty affordable compared to VRAM. With the Radeon SSG, AMD now had a whole two terabytes of memory to work with. Your move, Nvidia. Or actually, our move. And they even have standard Phillips screws, although they're not ferrous. I can't pick it up with the magnetic tip. Oh well. Yeah, it just comes right out. And a new one goes right on in. It's a little tricky because it doesn't have any magnetic properties. But in it goes. All right, one down, three to go. There, we're done. This is hilarious. You could totally run your system without any additional storage as long as you're OK with the overhead of sharing bandwidth with a GPU. That's not its intended purpose, of course. Putting the SSDs so close to the GPU means that, like with Microsoft's direct storage API, it doesn't have to go through the CPU or really any other part of the system if it's loading via the API straight to the GPU. Get subscribed, by the way, because the minute Microsoft gives us something to test direct storage with, we are on it. This arrangement tremendously speeds up access time, which is a crucial component to anything a GPU does, which is why it's such a hot topic today. Even the high bandwidth cache controller AMD included on the Vega GPUs that allows them to extend VRAM with main system memory is slow since it has to go through the CPU first. As we've seen, the SSG concept is sound, but only in a world where that much memory is necessary, only in a world where people are willing to use the API, and most unfortunately for AMD in 2017, only in a world where people work in 8K RAW and are not using lower resolution proxy clips, especially considering it was rocking Vega 64 specs alongside an asking price of $7,000 when it was new, although it quickly fell to $4,600 a few months after release. Because it's such a niche within a niche within a niche use case, I haven't been able to find any examples of it being used in the real world. But let's say demand for this feature does come back. Well, the promise of direct storage doing basically the same thing makes this arrangement costly and inefficient. I mean, there's no reason DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Creative Cloud couldn't use direct storage if games can. To its credit, you're getting a lot of M.2 slots and a GPU all in one package, but the bridge chip and controller hardware do not come cheap. And you're giving up bandwidth whenever the SSD is accessed by something that's not using the API. The Radeon Pro SSG was truly a product of its time, and I doubt we'll see such a beast again anytime soon. But I know we'll see more of our sponsor Vessi. Thanks to Vessi Footwear for sponsoring today's video. Vessi Footwear is known for being lightweight, easy to pack, comfortable, and most importantly, waterproof. Designed to keep you moving, Vessi released their new Everyday Move shoes. With enhanced breathability and added support, their style is perfect for the adventurous or those looking for something sportier. Featuring a pull tab to take them off and put them back on with ease, vegan suede lace cages, extra midsole cushioning, and the same waterproof Dymotex technology, you want to wear them everywhere. The dual climate knit material keeps your feet warm during winter and cool during the summer. Stay dry and get your Vessi shoes today at vessi.com slash Linus Tech Tips and get $25 off using code LINUSTECHTIPS at checkout. Thanks for watching guys. Go check out our recent video on the NVIDIA A100 for another example of a high-end piece of kit that has questionable practicality. It's a good one.