Blender Planning Vulkan Support This Year, Other Exciting Improvements

[tildearrow]

AMD's ROCm is a really confusing move to me.
That platform requires tons of extra work but delivers worse usability that their existing OpenCL runtime system.
If they focused on Vulkan Compute as their HIP's backend the situation would be much better, at least we don't need to wait for years before we can compute anything on RDNA

Agreed. Took me a long time to compile (it wanted its own version of LLVM!), and it was a big disappointment.
The GPU would take breaks while rendering using Blender Cycles, resulting in performance worse than CPU rendering.
Also, why did they have to make us use their own kernel on the first Ubuntu release? Why not just a DKMS module like AMDGPU-PRO back then?

RDNA was not designed as a compute architecture (unlike CDNA), but exactly...

Let's just hope CDNA and the NVIDIA mining cards allow the normal graphics cards to be in stock again...

[oleid]

AMD's ROCm is a really confusing move to me.
That platform requires tons of extra work but delivers worse usability that their existing OpenCL runtime system.

ROCm is much more than a OpenCL backend. It also provides GPU based BLAS and Lapack and support for machine learning, e.g. as tensorflow or pytorch backend.

[zxy_thf]

ROCm is much more than a OpenCL backend. It also provides GPU based BLAS and Lapack and support for machine learning, e.g. as tensorflow or pytorch backend.

Depends on the definition of ROCm.
As an umbrella name I agree it's more than that, but the frustrating status tells us even a ROCm based OpenCL is too much to ask for, nor to say properly optimized rocBLAS/OpenMI.

[bridgman]

Also, why did they have to make us use their own kernel on the first Ubuntu release? Why not just a DKMS module like AMDGPU-PRO back then?.

AFAIK we have been using DKMS modules for at least a couple of years... long enough that if we did something different before that I don't remember what it was.

It's not just "a DKMS module like AMDGPU-PRO" - it's actually the *same* DKMS module as AMDGPU-PRO albeit branched from main at a different point due to the differing release cycles. Yes we are trying to get the release cycles aligned as well.

[Med_]

Is there a go-to solution for using OpenCL with Cycles on an RX480? I have tried various OpenCL options. The only one I got working is the opencl-amd Arch AUR package but it is ~50% slower than CPU-based rendering (Intel Core i7 6700K), which is a bit frustrating. Any hope on the horizon on this?

[Vistaus]

they are kind to late for vulkan support ?

Still faster than GIMP supporting GTK3 lol

[kn00tcn]

Is there a go-to solution for using OpenCL with Cycles on an RX480? I have tried various OpenCL options. The only one I got working is the opencl-amd Arch AUR package but it is ~50% slower than CPU-based rendering (Intel Core i7 6700K), which is a bit frustrating. Any hope on the horizon on this?

well on windows with 580+zen1.5, i didnt see much performance difference between cycles-opencl & cycles-cpu on small scenes, so i always wondered if opencl is supposed to even have big gains

also tried radeon prorender, but that seemed to need a complete replacement of all materials