Blender 3.1 Released With New Features Sans AMD HIP Linux GPU Acceleration

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Blender 3.1 Released With New Features Sans AMD HIP Linux GPU Acceleration

Blender 3.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this incredibly powerful, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blender-3.1-Released

[tildearrow]

Got to be kidding me...

I don't understand. Do Blender developers hate AMD cards or something?

[numasan]

Got to be kidding me...

I don't understand. Do Blender developers hate AMD cards or something?

Direct your disappointment at AMD. Their compute stack is a mess, and nothing Blender devs can do.

[darkbasic]

Direct your disappointment at AMD. Their compute stack is a mess, and nothing Blender devs can do.

No, it's not. AMD supported OpenCL 2 since ages yet Blender decided to go the proprietary CUDA way nonetheless.

[tildearrow]

Direct your disappointment at AMD. Their compute stack is a mess, and nothing Blender devs can do.

There's Vulkan Compute...

[OneTimeShot]

Direct your disappointment at AMD. Their compute stack is a mess, and nothing Blender devs can do.

If you mean "why didn't AMD pay Blender to switch to their proprietary stack like Nvidia did?" then sure: AMD's fault...

[numasan]

darkbasic That's an ignorant statement. The Blender project spend a lot of time and resources on OpenCL support, which is very apparent if you had bothered to follow its development (clearly you don't). Ultimately AMD, which is involved, admitted defeat and have now shifted focus on rocm/HIP. But whatever, it doesn't fit your narrative, so just post BS...

[scottishduck]

I’m sure the 5 people using AMD cards for rendering are very disappointed

[chithanh]

Do Blender developers hate AMD cards or something?

No, it is just that the developer community and AMD have least concern for each other. AMD especially tramples on home labs (most recent example is PSB - it's from the CPU side but it clearly shows what AMD cares about and what not). And normal people cannot buy the cool AMD technology like SR-IOV which would make using AMD's cards worthwhile over NVidia's, so there's no reason for developers to dogfood their software on AMD hardware.

Even if AMD support one day comes to Blender, I would not bank on the support being solid. If something breaks on NVidia it will be first priority to fix. If something breaks on AMD, tough luck.

Until AMD realizes how home labs and open source contributors who operate them provide value that enterprise relationships can't (and acts accordingly), they will always be the inferior choice here.

[aufkrawall]

No, it's not. AMD supported OpenCL 2 since ages yet Blender decided to go the proprietary CUDA way nonetheless.

It was undead garbage anyway, performance with RDNA2 cards was pathetic. You could allow OpenCL also for Nvidia by disabling blocklist via env var, and then Turing/Ampere cards beat RDNA2 to death even without using RT cores. No idea what you want to blame the Blender project here for...