Improved OpenCL Support For Blender's Cycles Renderer

George Kyriazis of AMD has provided patches to the Blender project for vastly improving their OpenCL Cycles renderer support and allow for it to work with AMD GPUs.

Kyriazis wrote a Blender patch for splitting the Cycles' OpenCL mega-kernel into separate kernels. By breaking down the big compute kernel, better GPU utilization can be obtained and better performance. While George posted the patch, other AMD developers were also involved in redoing this OpenCL code for the Cycles renderer.

User benchmarks are showing huge improvements in the performance and also a slight reduction in CPU usage. While the work is still being reviewed, the patch can be viewed via developer.blender.org.