Blender 4.1 To Support Cycles Renderer On AMD RDNA3 APUs

[Panix]

Again, you're just listing examples of other developers who decided that since NVidia is the market leader anyway, they would put 90% of their effort into their CUDA backend and barely any effort into ROCm. KDenLive for example, works perfectly with AMD's hardware encoder for rendering videos, but for some reason you have to enter in a list of settings that it should auto-detect that have nothing to do with ROCm at all. It's literally just a basic string that says "use the GPU for encoding, and use the AMD encoder on the GPU". That's on KDenLive and their team for not even bothering to try and auto-detect AMD hardware.

Now, anybody who's used ROCm will tell you that it's not nearly as easy to use as CUDA and that's on AMD to fix and improve 100%, but most of what developers want IS available in ROCm for them to use if they put in the effort to use it. It's not like Nvidia is out here manually integrating CUDA code into every single productivity software and letting the developers hang back and do nothing, so why are we expecting AMD to do that?

As for naming examples, you can assume that pretty much any project that uses ROCm gets support from AMD because they have a ROCm support team the same way they have a gaming integration team. Blender is just the most obvious because it's open source and a large target so AMD submits code directly since the Blender team has said they're never personally going to support AMD, but for proprietary software most of AMD's support comes in the form of their ROCm team and private conversations about code. There are enough AMD GPU users that proprietary software finds it economical to at least implement basic support for AMD cards in their software, Divici Resolve being an obvious one where as far as I can tell from basic googling, most of the software "just works" on AMD cards.

Also, Blender's situation has nothing to do with investment on the side of NVidia or AMD. Neither of the companies are responsible. The core developers of Blender came out years ago to say they were never going to support AMD cards because they were never going to use an AMD card, they only ever buy NVidia. NVidia didn't have to invest anything at all into the project.

Okay, if you say so - you're making the argument not to use AMD cards - or persuading me to get an nvidia card (unintentionally, since you sound like an amd fan).

https://nobaraproject.org/docs/davinci-resolve/configuring-davinci-resolve-with-amd-gpus/

"Please note that DaVinci Resolve does not have the ability to encode video on AMD GPU hardware. The H264 and H265 encode options are only available on Nvidia hardware and only in the Studio version."

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/What-H-264-and-H-265-Hardware-Decoding-is-Supported-in-DaVinci-Resolve-Studio-2122/

Nvidia has more decoding options that AMD in H.265 (according to that chart). Blender only supports nvidia cards - only using nvidia cards. I can't help it if these companies only support "evil Ngreedia." But, they do and I plan on using those programs - at least, until I see if KdenLive and Gimp (for e.g.) are viable alternatives but for now, I'm using those two programs. You're giving me the argument that AMD cards are not suitable or are inferior or have critical disadvantages - let's not even mention the lack of features and settings for the actual hardware.
Thanks for helping. /s

[Daktyl198]

Okay, if you say so - you're making the argument not to use AMD cards - or persuading me to get an nvidia card (unintentionally, since you sound like an amd fan).

ah yes, the age old argument winner of “you are a fanboy, therefore nothing you say matters”. Except that I’m not a fanboy, I’d much rather use NVidia hardware because it’s simply better than AMD hardware. I make sure that all of my friends on Windows stay on Nvidia gpus. Nvidia is a terrible, anticompetitive company with an awful track record but none of that matters when their hardware is just better.

That being said, I’m also a fan of stable well integrated drivers on Linux, so I personally run an AMD card. But more than that, I’m a fan of people being able to use software no matter what hardware they choose. There’s no reason that 30+% of PC owners should just be left out of being able to use free and open source software just because the core devs are fanboys of a company.

As for DaVinci resolve, I was talking about in general AKA on Windows.

[Panix]

ah yes, the age old argument winner of “you are a fanboy, therefore nothing you say matters”. Except that I’m not a fanboy, I’d much rather use NVidia hardware because it’s simply better than AMD hardware. I make sure that all of my friends on Windows stay on Nvidia gpus. Nvidia is a terrible, anticompetitive company with an awful track record but none of that matters when their hardware is just better.

That being said, I’m also a fan of stable well integrated drivers on Linux, so I personally run an AMD card. But more than that, I’m a fan of people being able to use software no matter what hardware they choose. There’s no reason that 30+% of PC owners should just be left out of being able to use free and open source software just because the core devs are fanboys of a company.

As for DaVinci resolve, I was talking about in general AKA on Windows.

I get you. However, a) I didn't call you a fan boy. b) I said you *sound* like a fan boy. There's a big difference.

I agree with everything you said - I would like to pick an AMD gpu based on principle and I agree the Nvidia hardware is better - look at the advances in power consumption and efficiency they made with their Ada architecture. But, Nvidia got the moniker, 'Ngreedia' for a reason. They gimp and cripple their cards, have anti-competitive practices like you say and are very closed source and only 'improving' until recently. I also am looking at used cards and part of the reason is, I really don't want to give those companies my money at all. I only did it once (actually) in my PC building history and that was when I was picking all my components - I almost wish I waited (I bought a 3060 with my other stuff).

But, my complaint rests with AMD - with their supposed value in FOSS and the championing of them in this site and Linux circles - and supposedly - they should be good at workstation areas but that's where Nvidia excels and AMD isn't even on par. Then, there's also basic features missing or they're just lacking compared to Nvidia (although, both are lacking compared to Windows.). This thread is about Blender, though - and in Windows and (especially) Linux - AMD performance and features are lacking - as a user of the program and someone who has no horse in the race - I don't care if the Blender devs don't use AMD cards - maybe AMD should talk to them?!!?!? AMD has been slow with their Blender development and whether you want to blame them, Blender devs that don't cooperate or whatever excuse you want to make, the bottom line is - to use an AMD card with their software, you're at a disadvantage. That means something when the card is around/over $1K.

If the gap was just a bit less, that's different - then all the reasons you said for picking an AMD gpu in Linux would sway me to go AMD automatically - it would make sense. But, they're so behind in performance and there's also other alleged issues - that I will, instead, criticize AMD for not stepping up. They do it in the gaming sphere. But, not in the area of productivity/content creation and you know they'd publicly assert they care about it.