Blender 3.0 Will Have AMD HIP-Based GPU Acceleration

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Blender 3.0 Will Have AMD HIP-Based GPU Acceleration

With the big Blender 3.0 release due out near year's end there was the Cycles X rewrite that landed and unfortunately removed OpenCL support in the process. While that left AMD Radeon graphics without Blender GPU-accelerated support, in time for the v3.0 release there is now AMD HIP support in place...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blender-3.0-AMD-HIP-Ready

[ermo]

According to the nice people in #blender-coders @ blender.chat, AMD is working from the front of their hardware catalogue and backwards as time allows. No real word on when (or even if) Vega and Polaris will receive support.

Note that the Blender dev portal mentions RDNA as being supported too.

[Guest]

According to the nice people in #blender-coders @ blender.chat, AMD is working from the front of their hardware catalogue and backwards as time allows. No real word on when (or even if) Vega and Polaris will receive support.

Note that the Blender dev portal mentions RDNA as being supported too.

I hope they don't hit too many snags. The ROCm github has been getting heated over the slow release of v5.0, and it seems like a lot of newer cards have very little support.

[sp82]

Why not Vulkan for compute?

[soulsource]

Why not Vulkan for compute?

Or, in general, why not Compute Shaders?
(I'm not joking - I'm genuinely wondering why not.)

[unis_torvalds]

As an alternative for AMD GPU rendering: AMD's own ProRender works quite well on Blender. It's what i use (and much faster than Cycles OpenCL).

[Termy]

Why not Vulkan for compute?

Good question, given the [IRONY] very broad [/IRONY] ROCm support ^^

[ddriver]

Let's hope they will not half-bake it for the sake of inclusivity, all the while presenting their green overlords in an unrealistic light.

[Toggleton]

Why not Vulkan for compute?

"Eevee


Our high-quality real-time 3D rendering engine is being upgraded as well. The new design brings screen space global illumination, more efficient shading, improved volume rendering, panoramic cameras, and tight grease pencil integration. It also paves the way for GPU ray-tracing through Vulkan.
"

"A big target for the 3.x series is to move Blender to entirely use the Vulkan open standard. Vulkan and Metal backends for Blender’s GPU API are being developed. We expect these to be ready to replace the OpenGL backend by the end of 2022."

https://code.blender.org/2021/10/blender-3-x-roadmap/

Seems to me that HIP is just a CUDA compatibility layer while the switch to Vulkan will be a lot more work to do

[ddriver]

...

They are talking about the viewport renderer, not the production renderer.