AMD Joins The Blender Foundation With An Emphasis On Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Joins The Blender Foundation With An Emphasis On Vulkan

Just earlier this month NVIDIA announced their funding of the Blender Foundation at the flagship "patron" level and now AMD has followed them in backing this foundation for assisting the development of this leading 3D creation software...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Joins-Blender-Foundation

[M@GOid]

A few years ago, before Ryzen, AMD was trying to leverage some GPU power to compensate for Intel's lead on CPU, so they sponsored some OpenCL code on LibreOffice, but unfortunately the implementation is not functional today. I hope that changes in the near future.

[ms178]

After Nvidia joined it was just a question of when, not if AMD joins the Blender Foundation, too. As it is a prominent benchmark tool, and used by a lot of creators around the world.

@M@GOid, the OpenCL implementation was functional last time I checked LibreOffice some weeks ago, but that was on Windows. The OpenCL implementation of my notebook GPU is lacking some essential features which might be the culprit of it not working under Linux for you, too.

[shmerl]

Good to counteract Nvidia which is pushing CUDA lock-in into Blender.

[Danny3]

Awesome, good job AMD!
I'm glad that a part of the money that I invested buying AMD CPUs and GPUs in th last years are used for the good.

[programmerjake]

hoping they port the parts that require cuda, opencl, and/or open shader language to Vulkan compute shaders (which have more than enough power with the proper extensions enabled).

maybe make an open shader language to spir-v compiler?

[microcode]

Very cool. Blender is good for the entire graphics industry and community, and a balance of financing ensures that more people will get value out of these products.

[Nille_kungen]

Blender is a great software and they have really been taking off and gain more traction.
AMD sponsoring blender doesn't surprise me since it's widely used and the user base keeps growing fast.

[microcode]

A few years ago, before Ryzen, AMD was trying to leverage some GPU power to compensate for Intel's lead on CPU, so they sponsored some OpenCL code on LibreOffice, but unfortunately the implementation is not functional today. I hope that changes in the near future.

The Calc OpenCL backend still works, but it needs to be enabled manually. Also, the general quality of LO Calc is extremely poor, which really hinders its usefulness to people who are not committed to working around its quirks.

[profoundWHALE]

Vulkan Compute when?