How to run Whisper on an AMD Radeon GPU on Windows

Short answer: pip install babelscribe, then babelscribe video.mp4. It downloads a Vulkan build of whisper.cpp that runs on Radeon cards — no ROCm, no CUDA, no Visual Studio.

Why Whisper is hard on AMD + Windows

Most Whisper tools (openai-whisper, faster-whisper, WhisperX) use PyTorch or CTranslate2 with CUDA, so on a Radeon card they fall back to the CPU. ROCm on Windows covers only some cards and some libraries. whisper.cpp does run on AMD through Vulkan, but its official releases ship no Windows Vulkan binary, so you would normally install the Vulkan SDK and Visual Studio and compile it yourself.

Two-command setup

pip install babelscribe
babelscribe "my video.mp4"            # writes my video.srt and my video.json
babelscribe devices                   # shows which GPUs Vulkan sees

On first run babelscribe downloads a prebuilt whisper-cli (Vulkan, AVX2-compatible) and the large-v3-turbo model (~1.6 GB), then picks your discrete Radeon over the integrated GPU automatically. Use --device N to choose another card.

How fast is it?

GPU	Audio	Time	Speed
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (Vulkan)	19.3 min TED talk	48 s	~24x real time

Accuracy on that talk: 1.5% word error rate against the human captions. Use --accurate (large-v3 with beam search) when you want fewer errors and can wait about twice as long.

Other formats and languages

babelscribe talk.mp4 -f srt,vtt,txt,json   # all outputs
babelscribe talk.mp4 -l ja                 # force Japanese (default: auto-detect)
babelscribe talk.mp4 --accurate            # fewest errors

FAQ

Does Whisper work on AMD GPUs?

Yes. whisper.cpp runs on AMD Radeon GPUs through Vulkan on Windows and Linux. babelscribe downloads a prebuilt Vulkan build so you don't have to compile it.

Do I need ROCm to run Whisper on a Radeon card?

No. The Vulkan backend works with the normal AMD Adrenalin driver; ROCm is not needed.

Which AMD cards are supported?

Any card with a Vulkan 1.2+ driver should work; it has been tested on an RX 9070 XT. Reports for other cards are welcome on GitHub.

Can I use it without the command line?

Yes: add babelscribe to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI or Cursor as an MCP server and ask for subtitles in chat.

babelscribe is free and open source (MIT) · Privacy