AMD Posts Patch Enabling Vega APU/GPU Support For Blender's HIP Backend

With the AMD Radeon "HIP" acceleration in Blender 3.2 with the Cycles back-end, an unfortunate early limitation is that this is limited to just AMD RDNA2 (Radeon RX 6000 series) graphics processors while prior generation RDNA1 GPUs have issues with some textures like those used in the benchmarks. This week though AMD did post a new patch for Blender enabling HIP support on Windows and Linux for Vega/GFX9 graphics.

On Monday a patch was posted for enabling Vega support with Blender's Cycles HIP back-end. This Vega/GFX9 support works for both discrete GPUs like the Radeon VII and WX9100 workstation card as well as the very common Vega-based AMD APUs. The patch works for both Windows and Linux although a new AMD HIP SDK is needed.

The patch makes changes for supporting 64-bit waves on pre-RDNA GPUs. Only GFX9/Vega is supported with this new patch and not any older Radeon GPUs. The patch is now awaiting review by Blender developers for mainlining. The hope is though to have this Vega HIP support in place for Blender 3.3 due out in September.

AMD engineers are still working on the Blender Cycles HIP RDNA1 problem but have no ETA yet on a resolution to that Radeon RX 5000 series support.

In case you missed it from last week, on Blender 3.2 under Linux see my AMD HIP vs. NVIDIA CUDA vs. NVIDIA OptiX render benchmarks. Also on the table for Blender 3.3 is likely seeing the oneAPI SYCL back-end for Intel GPU acceleration.