OpenCL Remains One Of AMDGPU-PRO's Main Advantages, Can't Wait For It To Be Open

[Amarildo]

juno Surprisingly Catalyst 15.12 worked "OK" here, while the last time I tried it was buggy AF. In some games, it's performance is better than AMDGPU with mesa-git, some even as good as Windows, others way worse than OSS drivers. However, OpenCL is 50% slower than what it used to be, which is kinda what you see with Windows. I do believe Blender itself has something to do with this, I remember seeing slower renders with 2.78. However, I also believe AMD has something to do with the slowdowns, which you can see on the NVIDIA side for what I could tell. I was able to render the BMW on ~2min, now it's 3mins.

https://i.imgur.com/PkqhdwC.png

One other thing I noticed is, with Catalyst's OpenCL I cannot use the rendered preview (SHIFT + Z) on big scenes. I use HDRi to light all of my scenes, and some HDR's are as big as 400 MB (in 16k) which spikes memory consumption in Blender to +2-4 GB just by adding that image. And if I do Rendered Preview, GPU usage will go to 99% and the system will hang, although I wasn't able to recover it, the only solution is to hard reset.
I believe you don't have that problem on AMDGPU-PRO. At least I don't have it on Windows.

So between Windows and Linux, it's the opposite: on Windows the Camera rendering doesn't work, but preview does. On Linux, camera rendering works fine, but preview doesn't.

That's why I think using Catalyst's OpenCL is not the best way to go fordwards, AMD.

[Amarildo]

Correction: which you CAN'T see on the NVIDIA side for what I could tell.

[juno]

Yeah, I believe/I don't doubt that you have problems.
But, tbh, their OpenCL has never been their first priority, but CUDA. AMD got it working in the first place. AMD got developers exclusively working on better OpenCL support for Blender now. So we'll see how it turns out. A HIPified version would also be interesting, as CUDA is still better on Nvidia. But I'm not sure if this could happen anytime soon.
And, last but not least, AMD does not plan to carry the old OpenCL driver around for long time but intends to utilise the ROC stack in the future.

[Amarildo]

Reported the Windows bug upstream. Does anyone know how long it usually takes for them to fix bugs?

[Naquatis]

I need to necroing this thread because with Mesa 20.0.2 both GCN (Polaris) and RDNA (Navi) not able to use AMDGPU-PRO opencl anymore.

Ok I was wrong ..

I removed all of my old installations from:

https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/amdgpu-pro-installer/

with:

pacman -R $(pacman -Qg Radeon_Software_for_Linux | cut -f2 -d" ")

I also removed opencl-mesa and installed the following package:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opencl-amd/

Finally the RX 5700 XT working like expected on kernel 5.6.2 .. thank you kode54 and everyone who has contributed to this package!

But the crashes I get when using Blender and AMD OpenCL are still abysmal no matter if the card run in oc or silent mode.