AMD has provided instructions on how to run DeepSeek’s R1 AI model on AI-accelerated Ryzen AI and Radeon products, making it easy for users to run the new chain-of-thought model on their PCs locally. Several LLMs using R1 are compatible with RX 7000 series desktop GPUs and select Ryzen CPUs with XDNA NPUs. However, they require the optional driver Adrenalin 25.1.1 to run.
The guide has everything AMD users need to get DeepSeek R1 running on their local (supported) machine. LM Studio has a one-click installer tailor-made for Ryzen AI, which is the method AMD users will use to install R1. AMD shows how the application needs to be tuned for its hardware, including a list of the maximum supported LLM parameters.
DeepSeek R1 allegedly has only recently been distilled into "highly capable" smaller models, small enough to run on consumer-based hardware. The DeepSeek-V3 model was initially trained on a cluster of 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs for context.
The maximum supported LLM parameters are based on memory capacity. The RX 7600 XT, 7700 XT, 7800 XT, 7900 GRE, and 7900 XT all support up to “DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B”. The flagship RX 7900 XTX supports up to “DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B”. The RX 7600, with its 8GB of VRAM, supports up to “DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B”.
Similarly, Ryzen 8040 and 7040 series mobile APUs are equipped with 32GB of RAM, and the Ryzen AI HX 370 and 365 with 24GB and 32GB of RAM can support up to “DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-14B”. The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 can support up to “DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B”, but only in 128GB and 64GB memory capacities. The 32GB supports up to “DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B”.
DeepSeek’s new AI model has taken the world by storm, with its 11 times lower computing cost than leading-edge models. Two days ago, it was solely responsible for Nvidia’s record-breaking $589 billion market cap loss. The DeepSeek R1 model relies on extreme optimization levels to provide its 11X efficiency uplift, relying on Nvidia’s assembly-like Parallel Thread Execution (PTX) programming for most of the performance uplift.
Nvidia and AMD GPUs aren’t the only GPUs that can run R1; Huawei has already implemented DeepSeek support into its Ascend AI GPUs, enabling performant AI execution on homegrown Chinese hardware.
