Blender 3.2 Debuts With AMD GPU Linux Rendering Support

Blender 3.2 is releasing this morning as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling and animation software package. Blender 3.2 finally adds AMD GPU-accelerated rendering support on Linux and many other refinements.

Most exciting from our perspective with Blender 3.2 is AMD GPU rendering support finally on Linux! This is for RDNA/RDNA2 GPUs and works with the Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) compute stack / HIP. Blender 3.2 on Linux has been tested using AMD's Radeon Software 22.10 packaged Linux driver. Pre-RDNA GPUs are not officially supported.

This Radeon Linux support for Blender 3.x is great to see happen after OpenCL was removed in Blender 3.0 and only NVIDIA GPUs were then supported on Linux with the OptiX/CUDA support in Blender. Blender 3.1 added initial AMD GPU HIP support but only for Windows and now with Blender 3.2 is the AMD GPU Linux support. I'll be working on some Blender 3.2 Linux benchmarks shortly on Phoronix.

Meanwhile Intel is working on oneAPI + SYCL for Arc Graphics acceleration. We'll see if that gets finished for Blender 3.3.

Some of the other Blender 3.2 changes include:

- Reworking the UI for Library Overrides in the Outliner.

- Improved smooth algorithm for the grease pencil and various other improvements to its functionality.

- A new "curve pen" tool in the curve edit mode to rapidly edit and create curves.

- Many performance improvements to the geometry nodes.

- An experimental OBJ importer has been added that is written in C++ and much faster than prior Python importer efforts. Blender's experimental OBJ exporter is also now much faster.

- Blender added support for the WebP image format.

- Many Sculpt mode improvements.

- Support for HTC Vive Focus 3 controllers and other virtual reality (VR) improvements.

See the 3.2 release notes for more details on the Blender 3.2 release. Blender 3.2 can be downloaded from Blender.org.