Blender 4.1 Released With Faster Linux CPU Rendering & AMD RDNA3 APU Support

[Panix]

Intel's Arc A770 is faster than a 3090?!? No amd gpu to be found as being able to match either of these cards?!??

https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.1/cycles/

Intel just started manufacturing discrete gpus and AMD had a head start when they acquired ATI - what an embarrassment for them!!!

Maybe they should stick to processors?

[WannaBeOCer]

I love amd but, while Nvidia, intel and apple provide denoising support, amd provides... Basic support on their customer hardware??

Then just use their render: https://www.amd.com/en/products/grap...prorender.html

Intel's Arc A770 is faster than a 3090?!? No amd gpu to be found as being able to match either of these cards?!??

https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.1/cycles/

Intel just started manufacturing discrete gpus and AMD had a head start when they acquired ATI - what an embarrassment for them!!!

Maybe they should stick to processors?

It's because Blender is using Intel Open Image Denoise. AMD and Nvidia both have their own denoiser. Example Nvidia has OptiX, AMD has this: https://radeon-pro.github.io/RadeonP.../denoiser.html

[Grinness]

Intel's Arc A770 is faster than a 3090?!? No amd gpu to be found as being able to match either of these cards?!??

https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.1/cycles/

Intel just started manufacturing discrete gpus and AMD had a head start when they acquired ATI - what an embarrassment for them!!!

Maybe they should stick to processors?

Maybe reading the docs?

For AMD GPUs, it is currently not enabled due to stability issues. However it can be tested in daily Blender 4.2 builds. There it is supported for AMD RDNA2 and RDNA3 generation discrete GPUs.

https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.1/cycles/

[mirmirmir]

[QUOTE=WannaBeOCer;n1452588]

Then just use their render: https://www.amd.com/en/products/grap...prorender.html


That's for expensive hardware, not for costumer hardware, also it's not built in, you gotta install that addon

[yump]

If anyone is curious, the reason for the CPU rendering perf improvment on Linux is that they switched the switch in jemalloc to make it request transparent huge pages. Apparently this is kind of possible on Windows in theory, with a lot more hassle and root access.

[tenchrio]

That's for expensive hardware, not for costumer hardware, also it's not built in, you gotta install that addon

AMDs Radeon Prorender is hardware agnostic (runs on any card that supports OpenCL1.2 as well as Metal so Apple's M series chips), so it does run on Consumer GPUs, it even runs on Nvidia's hardware (probably Intel too). It is also still a free addon, lots of Blender's shortcomings have been solved through free addons (some even ship with Blender, I doubt many experienced users would ever be able to live without Node Wrangler).

AMDs Hydra Storm plugin (also hardware agnostic) does now ship with Blender (but like Node Wrangler must be activated first) and is the quickest way to get a simple USD based render engine going even for Nvidia (Nvidia has the Omniverse addon which you need to download and install but that is more for interoperability with Omniverse itself and doesn't provide the render engine inside of Blender). As far as I can tell AMD is the one providing the USD Hydra support into Blender which for professional use cases is rather important, additionally AMD provides a free MaterialX library for use with USD Hydra Delegates (which isn't just Prorender but also Pixar's Renderman and Dreamwork's Moonray) which again can be used and accessed if you are using Nvidia cards.

[darkbasic]

For AMD RDNA3 APU?!? What about DESKTOP GPUS?

AFAIK they were already supported in 4.0

[Panix]

AFAIK they were already supported in 4.0

Right - that's my point...there's been 'support' - supposedly, but there's crashing or other reasons for it not working (properly) - unstable, whatever. There's been some reviewers who have tested/benchmarked it but couldn't complete the tests because the renders wouldn't finish or it would crash or something like that.

Intel seems to be making some progress and their gpus are only in early stages. It's a pretty pathetic showing by AMD - but, that's usual/typical for their graphics cards and software.

Any bets for the benchmarks done here on the AMD cards to be yet another fail? Also, remember, the only *CHANCE* for AMD to make any showing in Blender is if HIP-RT A) WORKS and B) PERFORMS WELL and I'm betting neither happen.

Also, it's likely, the only gpus that *might* be good performers *by some miracle* will be the RX 7900 series - from my impressions/research, that was my conclusion.

[Panix]

AMDs Radeon Prorender is hardware agnostic (runs on any card that supports OpenCL1.2 as well as Metal so Apple's M series chips), so it does run on Consumer GPUs, it even runs on Nvidia's hardware (probably Intel too). It is also still a free addon, lots of Blender's shortcomings have been solved through free addons (some even ship with Blender, I doubt many experienced users would ever be able to live without Node Wrangler).

AMDs Hydra Storm plugin (also hardware agnostic) does now ship with Blender (but like Node Wrangler must be activated first) and is the quickest way to get a simple USD based render engine going even for Nvidia (Nvidia has the Omniverse addon which you need to download and install but that is more for interoperability with Omniverse itself and doesn't provide the render engine inside of Blender). As far as I can tell AMD is the one providing the USD Hydra support into Blender which for professional use cases is rather important, additionally AMD provides a free MaterialX library for use with USD Hydra Delegates (which isn't just Prorender but also Pixar's Renderman and Dreamwork's Moonray) which again can be used and accessed if you are using Nvidia cards.

If you read over on AMD's support website - users' questions and comments regarding Prorender, there's a lot of issues and ppl are having problems with it. Those threads - practically all of them go nowhere and they die - suggesting no solution or fix was found.

[tenchrio]

If you read over on AMD's support website - users' questions and comments regarding Prorender, there's a lot of issues and ppl are having problems with it. Those threads - practically all of them go nowhere and they die - suggesting no solution or fix was found.

If you read over on Nvidia's support forum - user questions and comments regarding Omniverse RTX Renderer, there's a lot of issues and ppl are having problems with it. Those threads - practically all of them go nowhere and they die - suggesting no solution or fix was found.

No seriously it happens there too, some questions have had 0 replies since April 2023 or even earlier.
But all of that is irrelevant, we went over this before, if you look for negativity you will find it AMD, Intel or Nvidia doesn't matter. Someone will experience crashes for a reason that might not be a bug. Looking at the Radeon Prorender support forum I already see so many questionable topics, like out of date Blender versions (so no LTS or blender version post 2023 despite being asked last week) or a lack of information like driver version or even Windows version (no not just 10, I mean like 10 21h2).

And even for Nvidia's RTX renderer forum this goes, some questions are also just nonsensical like "Using RTX Renderer as a library"..... what?! It's a render engine, this question doesn't make sense so no wonder that nobody, not even the Nvidia staff have touched it since March 28 2023.

Right - that's my point...there's been 'support' - supposedly, but there's crashing or other reasons for it not working (properly) - unstable, whatever. There's been some reviewers who have tested/benchmarked it but couldn't complete the tests because the renders wouldn't finish or it would crash or something like that.

I think I know what benchmarks you are talking about and that was only true for HIP-RT, normal HIP worked fine in every benchmark and it was also on Blender 3.6 not the previously released 4.0 for which I still haven't found a proper deep dive (RIP Techgage).

It should be noted Blender 4.0 saw a performance regression that in theoretical numbers hit Nvidia the hardest and only AMD's RX 7900XTX saw an uplift in performance.
Actual render times are hard to find (and I explained before why the Opendata Benchmark and its scoring system are extremely questionable even when addressing it solely using Nvidia cards, even to this date somehow the RTX 4080 still beats the 4080 Super and the RTX 3090 still beats its TI version by 100s according to this benchmark).

Intel seems to be making some progress and their gpus are only in early stages. It's a pretty pathetic showing by AMD - but, that's usual/typical for their graphics cards and software.

Intel's OpenGL performance is still very lacking and Blender once again delayed Eevee-Next which would bring Vulkan.
This opengl problem affects both Eevee and the viewport, in Wireframe mode Intel's A770 had about 1/7th the performance of the RX7600 in Blender 3.6.
It is pretty obvious you are just looking to shit on AMD (again) since I have told you this before as well as how you can circumvent this by using a different render engine like Hydra Storm (which comes from an AMD made extension) which uses Vulkan (for any Intel users reading along, this does have its downsides if you are planning to do the final render in Cycles, not all Blender Material nodes, specifically the procedural ones, are supported so they won't show up in Material Preview mode unless you bake them first with Cycles) or downloading the daily/dev build for Blender which ships with Eevee-Next in its current form.

If somehow AMD using other Render engines isn't allowed why does Intel get a free pass on an otherwise very serious performance issue?

Any bets for the benchmarks done here on the AMD cards to be yet another fail? Also, remember, the only *CHANCE* for AMD to make any showing in Blender is if HIP-RT A) WORKS and B) PERFORMS WELL and I'm betting neither happen.

I'm sorry what does "the only *CHANCE* for AMD to make any showing in Blender" even mean?
Like it shows up the Blender settings menu if you enable it under HIP if that is what you are implying.

We have been over this as well, Blender isn't just the cycles render engine. If you use it as a modeling or sculpting tool AMD cards would be ideal since they offer far better viewport performance for a lower price and those use cases aren't niche; Blender has good interoperability with Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot to the point those can import straight from Blend files. Multiple courses exist detailing workflows from Blender to one of those game engines.
Also if you are going to bring up the pugetsystems Unreal Engine benchmark you better bring up the Rasterization performance and not just the RT performance which is off by default or the combined score which just exists for reference not actual use case. It also better be the recent one with the RTX super.