NVIDIA Begins Funding Blender Development

[tului]

Disgusting. They'll stick their proprietary crap in there

[polarathene]

PhysX (good luck finding hardware accelerated PhysX in any new game, it's all slow CPU accelerated junk) and what have you... Proprietary APIs are always doomed even if they succeed temporarily they are doomed in the long run.

PhysX is open-source now, what's the issue? https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/1...y-open-source/

It’s already integrated into some of the most popular game engines, including Unreal Engine (versions 3 and 4) and Unity3D.

It will still need someone to add in support for AMD, or perhaps use those CUDA compatibility tools if that's less work to get it working. Nothing really stopping support for such now though.

[profoundWHALE]

They are working on adding a few more OpenCL-like bits into Vulkan.

But Mummy I don't want to use CUDA - Open source GPU compute - https://2019.linux.conf.au/

[tildearrow]

While it would be nice, I think that boat has already sailed. CUDA is the GPGPU API of choice in most industries including graphics rendering development. That said, Blender already does support OpenCL very well.

Which means my AMD card is useless?

Blender doesn't support OpenCL well. It takes so long to render on my AMD GPU (unless maybe after setting the node size).

[tildearrow]

They already do, to some extent. It's good whenever a vendor does this sort of thing.

Do you have a source?

[AndyChow]

Disgusting. They'll stick their proprietary crap in there

Nvidia doesn't hire the devs, they just pay for two of them. I doubt it will influence the project negatively.

[Mathias]

Nvidia doesn't hire the devs, they just pay for two of them. I doubt it will influence the project negatively.

Blender itself won't be influenced negatively. I think it would be great if everyone would move to a common Compute API instead of CUDA. And if CUDA support gets better (now with RTX...), that goal gets a little further away.
That is actually my biggest hope for the new Intel dedicated GPU, that they will help push some common compute API.

[kpedersen]

Ah yes... just like Glide, PhysX (good luck finding hardware accelerated PhysX in any new game, it's all slow CPU accelerated junk) and what have you... Proprietary APIs are always doomed even if they succeed temporarily they are doomed in the long run.

This is very true. It also has a knockon effect. All those proprietary games companies instantly jump to the "proprietary alternative" for their middleware because they are a bunch of naive shills. So 10 years later they cannot open-source it because they are locked down to a dependency that cannot be opened (usually the middleware company has already gone bankrupt and disappeared).

So alas, all this great art gets taken to the grave along with the twirps who made the bad decisions. Basically Unreal'99 is stuck in limbo because of this.

This even happens now with DirectX too. Unlike OpenGL, DirectX dies every revision and another technology called DirectX N+1 is born. Microsoft is good at muddying up peoples understanding when they kill a technology; they just give something else the same name and pretend it didn't happen (remember VB6, VB.NET? The same will happen in around 3 years with C#, they will just rename C++/cx to C# and try to trick everyone)
Does anyone remember a time (around 2005) when everyone would state "DirectX is the only choice". Bunch of twits.

[microcode]

Do you have a source?

<https://developer.amd.com/collaboration-and-open-source-at-amd-blender-cycles/>

Also if you consider ProRender for Blender to be a benefit to Blender, which I do. <https://amd.com/en/technologies/rade...render-blender>

And also for several years, AMD has been sending funds to the Blender Foundation.

[schmidtbag]

People here are so negative. Worst-case scenario, Blender only gets better CUDA support. How is that a bad thing? If you bought Nvidia hardware, you'll be directly benefiting from the money they put in. If you didn't buy their hardware, you won't see any differences at all. Sound perfectly reasonable to me.
Best-case scenario, Blender as a whole is improved, maybe even getting a nice kickstart on Vulkan, which everyone will benefit from.
There is so little of a chance Nvidia will be causing problems.