Blender 3.3 AMD Radeon HIP vs. NVIDIA CUDA/OptiX Performance

With the very common BMW scene for Blender, the Radeon VII and RX Vega 56 graphics cards were now working with Blender 3.3 for the HIP back-end! Though the BMW model wasn't working with the RDNA1-based Radeon RX 5700 XT. As for the AMD HIP performance in Blender 3.3, the Radeon RX 6800 XT performance was coming in just behind the RTX 2080 SUPER with CUDA. Of course, the OptiX back-end yielded much greater performance where even a GeForce RTX 2060 can outperform all of the Radeon GPUs with the non-RT HIP back-end.

The Radeon GPUs were consuming less power than the tested GeForce GPUs during these Blender 3.3 rendering benchmarks.

It's nice that the GFX9/Vega GPUs are now working with the Radeon HIP back-end on Blender 3.3 but unfortunate that it's taken so long for this Radeon HIP back-end to mature for Blender, but hopefully moving forward AMD will be more punctual with their enhancements. Certainly I am looking forward to Blender 3.5 with the planned AMD ray-tracing support. With the more demanding Blender "Classroom" scene, the RX 6800 XT was performing similar to the GeForce RTX 3070 with the CUDA back-end.

The Classroom scene running on these GPUs saw the Radeon RX 6800 XT consuming less power than the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with either the CUDA or OptiX back-end.