ROCm and Vulkan both accelerate AMD GPUs for local LLM hosting, but they are not interchangeable. The right choice depends on the engine, GPU, and workload. In local LLM hosting the two backends sit at different layers. ROCm is AMD's compute platform under PyTorch, vLLM, and SGLang, while Vulkan is a portable GPU API that llama.cpp-class engines use to run quantized models across a wide range of hardware. This guide compares the two engine by engine — llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, SG...