AMD HIP Linux GPU Acceleration For Blender Delayed To v3.2 Release

Last year Blender 3.0 added AMD HIP acceleration to its Cycles X render code with OpenCL having been removed. That AMD HIP support for Blender 3.0 was limited to Windows with plans to then enable Linux support for Blender 3.1. Sadly due to AMD driver delays, that HIP Linux support is postponed to Blender 3.2.

Blender 3.1 is due to be released in March and sadly will be lacking AMD HIP support on Linux.

Brian Savery of AMD commented on the AMD HIP Cycles X tracking ticket:

Regarding Linux support:

Our driver release timeline unfortunately doesn't quite line up with the dates for Blender 3.1, and there are some fixes in there that are needed. It should be out sometime after bcon3 and before bcon4, but I'm proposing Linux support gets pushed to Blender 3.2 so there is time for testing. Linux users should be able to use it under 3.2 in march though.

Blender 3.2 daily development builds currently in their "alpha" form can be found via builder.blender.org, but is an unfortunate setback that the AMD HIP Linux support won't be found in Blender 3.1 due to AMD not having updated Linux drivers out in time... Blender 3.2 is currently aiming for release in June.

Hopefully there will be no further delays in AMD HIP for Linux with Blender for benefiting from Radeon GPU acceleration. For those heavily using Blender on Linux, NVIDIA with their proprietary driver stack has long provided the best CUDA/OptiX GPU accelerated support. Even right now it seems most AMD Radeon Linux users don't install the Radeon ROCm driver stack for HIP support either and currently isn't widely packaged outside of the enterprise Linux distributions... Hopefully Vulkan support within Blender can take shape well and soon enough to improve the GPU support within this leading open-source 3D modeling software.