These days, one could paraphrase an old joke from the communist era: artificial intelligence is everywhere, and you’re almost afraid to open a can of food in case you find it there as well. Now AI jumps out at you if you own a Radeon GPU. AMD has long been criticized for lagging behind Nvidia in artificial intelligence, and it is responding with a new “AI Bundle” that introduced into the graphics card drivers.
This is an optional add-on that can be installed together with Radeon GPU drivers, called AI Bundle, and it was released last week alongside the new AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 26.1.1 drivers. It contains various preconfigured applications for using artificial intelligence models on a PC with a Radeon graphics card and/or an AMD processor—for example, tools for image and video clip generation, as well as language models.
These are local AI applications, where the model runs on your own device (meaning it must be downloaded and stored locally, which causes the bundle to take up a significant amount of space) and everything remains private. Unlike using online services such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Bing and Copilot, where all your prompts and tasks are sent to the provider’s servers—giving them a glimpse (and opportunity to record) of your darkest and/or most embarrassing ideas.
The reason AMD is doing this is that, until recently, running AI applications was not particularly easy. This even applied to Nvidia graphics cards, where many tools required extensive installations of development environments and SDKs, command-line usage, and similar tasks—something on the level of compiling software projects. This is also why AI was more at home in Linux environment than Windows, where users expect finished, “fully baked” applications ready for use. And in the case of AMD GPUs, accessibility was always even more difficult and problematic, because support of the ROCm compute environment on AMD GPUs under Windows was weak for a long time, if it existed at all.
AMD has recently brought ROCm into a more usable form, officially supporting newer graphics card models on Windows. This AI Bundle adds the second part—namely a selection of applications and software components that are ready, compiled, and preconfigured for PCs with Radeon graphics cards or Ryzen processors, and immediately usable without the barriers described above.
This includes both end-user applications and tools and environments for development. This selection is probably meant to be in part productivity ready, in part more of a demonstration of AMD’s AI acceleration capabilities on graphics cards under Windows. It’s not a comprehensive, exhaustive set of everything an AI enthusiast might need or want. What is included in the bundle:
- PyTorch for Windows: A widely used framework for artificial intelligence applications that enables the use of pre-trained models created by others (i.e. inference), as well as development and creation of custom AI models (training).
- ComfyUI: A tool that serves as a user interface for working with various AI models running on PyTorch. Models can be installed and used directly from it. Note: For some reason, this application did not add a shortcut to the Start menu for us; you can find it installed at AppData\Local\AMD\AI_Bundle\ComfyUI within your personal Windows folder, where it can be launched via the Launch_ComfyUI.bat file (the program path can be found, for example, inthe AMD Install Manager application).
- Ollama: A tool for AI models of the LLM (large language model) type, used for local text generation, code (program) generation, and automation. It can be used standalone or integrated into programs or scripts. A fairly large number of models is available directly from the program interface, and optionally (larger) cloud-based models can be used instead of local ones.
- LM Studio: Also used for installing and running large language models, with easily accessible configuration and parameter tuning.
- Amuse 2.0: An application that was already available previously, for generating images and video directly from a graphical user interface (without the need to work with the command line and similar), while also allowing the selection and download of various models for image/video generation. In addition to classic generation from a text prompt, it can also generate from a hand-drawn sketching or an existing image, and it also provides inpainting and feature extractor functions.
The AI Bundle is available for Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards and some models of the Radeon RX 7000 generation—these should be cards from the Radeon RX 7700 XT upwards. With lower-end cards, you will be limited to less useful and lower-quality models, as capabilities improve with the number of parameters (which corresponds to memory usage).
Alternatively, a newer Ryzen processor can be used—namely Krackan Point, Strix Point, Gorgon Point, or Strix Halo APUs, i.e. Ryzen AI 300 and 400 series. Individual applications differ in whether they run on GPU, NPU, or CPU cores. APUs have the advantage that they can allocate more memory to the model than a discrete graphics card—provided you have sufficient RAM in your PC or laptop.
Installation remains optional, the driver will not force AI on you
The bundle should not install automatically (which is good, as it can occupy tens of gigabytes of disk space). You can select it at the moment of driver installation, where it is offered as an optional item.
If you have the AMD Install Manager utility installed, which downloads and updates drivers automatically, it can be opened and the AI Bundle option is also available there. By selecting “Install …” all items can be downloaded and installed, while clicking the arrow next to it should allow selecting only certain components.
This new feature does not mean that the listed applications are somehow integrated directly into the Radeon graphics card drivers themselves—it is a separate installation that should be removable independently and does not manifest itself in the AMD Software application. So if you are allergic to “AI slop” and just want to play games and use your computer, the AI Bundle should not affect you in any way.
Source: AMD
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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