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Cycles X

code.blender.org

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Re: Cycles X

#111

Post by RaisingSpear »

raphlinus wrote: post #98
RaisingSpear wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCL is old, and everyone seemingly wants to abandon it, but it's your only option for a bunch of configurations (such as AMD on Windows, even though AMD has pulled all their OpenCL stuff from their website). As someone who's done a fair bit of SIMD programming on CPU, and heard many scream that wide SIMD (like AVX512) is pointless when you have GPGPU, it's certainly eye-opening to see how poor a state cross-platfo…

Vulkan supports integer operations just fine, but tool support for just about everything is extremely primitive. Sizes other than 32 bits are available, but generally as an option. You can check https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listfeaturescore10.php to see the fraction of drivers that support the various integer sizes (and lots other optional features).

Thanks! I guess I got confused with the information out there.

Most examples seem to be using GLSL shaders for the kernel, but posts seem to indicate it uses SPIR-V as input [https://community.khronos.org/t/is-a-vulkan-compute-shader-d...]. And then you have threads like this [https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/amd-dropped-sp...] saying that SPIR-V isn't supported on the AMD's Windows driver (I had similar issues myself trying to get SYCL examples to run), though I see other places running Vulkan Compute stuff on AMD+Windows. Maybe that only applies to SPIR-V with an OpenCL runtime?

Diagrams [https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/apis/2020-spir-landin...] seem to indicate that you can feed stuff like OpenCL and SYCL into SPIR-V (and then Vulkan Compute) instead of GLSL. For the former case, would you essentially still be using OpenCL, but just with a different runtime? (though articles like this [https://linuxreviews.org/The_State_Of_OpenCL_To_Vulkan_Compu...] seem to suggest OpenCL -> Vulkan isn't in a good state)

Re: Cycles X

#112

Post by dogma1138 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #84
dogma1138 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ROCm is a total mess, and is Linux only. OneAPI is in a rather good state considering it’s barely a release candidate now I’ll put my money on Blender support Intel GPUs sooner than AMD ones with Cycles X unless AMD will adopt OneAPI.

OneAPI/SYCL also works on AMD if the card supports ROCM.

“Works” and actually works are different things. ROCm isn’t in a state that i would define actually working atm, considering just how broken their CUDA to HIP stuff is I’m not going to hold my breath.

Re: Cycles X

#113

Post by capableweb »

jollybean wrote: post #86
gmueckl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maya was an amazing piece of software once. It is falling behind only because Autodesk seems to be content to just let it slowly rot. The funny thing is that there are litanies of complaints about many core Autodesk products that echo the same chorus: the software is poorly maintained, bugfixes are promised "for the next released" (paid upgrade, of course) and yet, they never appear. Customer feature requests are com…

Autodesk and Adobe have become a problem, the lack of competition and incumbency mean they are basically milking the same cow ad nauseam. To be a little bit fair - those systems are in fact very complex, and it is quite a big deal to do anything in them. But literally as I speak Photoshop will not go 'fullscreen' on my Mac, and Adobe blames this utterly ridiculous bug on Apple. Which may very well be the case but who…

> things are retrograding a little bit

Sure thing, but it seems even you are acknowledging that this specific issue seems to belong to Apple rather than Autodesk, so you're saying things are retrograding in the Apple ecosystem here, not Autodesk.

Disclaimer: I'm biased against Autodesk and love Blender, but even I see the fault in your argument here.

Re: Cycles X

#114

Post by capableweb »

packetslave wrote: post #76
127 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Blender is an amazing project and great 3D production software for being free. However there are many issues that remain unresolved after years. Viewport performance being one of them. There seems to be at least to an extent a mode of development where fun new things get done but old, boring, more critical issues will not. I give all credit to Blender developers for doing the old, boring and important things. It…

A friend of mine in the industry who is now switching from Maya to Blender for concept art once said: "yeah, Blender is free... if you don't count the $200 in add-ons you need to buy to get anything done." I wonder what percentage of Blender enthusiasts DON'T have Boxcutter and HardOps installed at a minimum.

You can purchase up to ~1500 USD a year on plugins/models/textures with Blender and it'll still be cheaper than a yearly subscription to Maya. It's not hard to understand why Blender is currently picking up a lot of momentum.

Re: Cycles X

#115

Post by [deleted] »

berkut wrote: post #69
thomastjeffery wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. I see this claim taken seriously all over the place, and I just don't get it. How in the world is the GPL actually an issue? The GPL does not apply to anything made with Blender; only changes made to Blender. You can very trivially use Blender without ever dealing with the GPL. Do studios really think they need to make changes/extensions to B…

When you write plugins (which VFX studios write a lot of for various DCCs like Maya, Nuke, Katana, Houdini) for GPL software, are the plugins then derived works? Does Blender's License have an opt-out clause for that? Sometimes (but not often) these plugins do need to be shared with other studios (or even the vendor - Netflix is starting to get fairly aggressive in asking for copies of the source work, but that doesn…

[deleted]

Re: Cycles X

#116

Post by random5634 »

sagarm wrote: post #100
MattGaiser wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL may as well mean radioactive as far as legal is concerned. A friend worked at a company where they banned GIMP as they feared that editing logos and other trademarks in it could invalidate them. Even working for a tech company, I don't think I would suggest using anything GPL as it would cause a fuss.

Tons of widely used software -- Linux, for one -- is GPL.

The current version of GPL is 100% toxic at many places I know of - this is not overly conservative lawyers - you have all sorts of rules around releasing your encryption keys - secure boot chains etc - it’s a no go and viral

Re: Cycles X

#117

Post by random5634 »

packetslave wrote: post #75
actinium226 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"

Studios write a LOT of custom code for their pipeline and tools. If you were to go to ILM or Dreamworks or WDAS and watch someone use Maya there, it would look COMPLETELY different from what you see at home. Given that, I'm not surprised that the (not-always-technical) lawyers are worried about GPL.

Current version of GPL is an absolute no go for many larger places - even Ubuntu ended up dropping it for parts of stack - risks are way too high

Re: Cycles X

#118

Post by random5634 »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #57
dagmx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn…

> Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. I see this claim taken seriously all over the place, and I just don't get it. How in the world is the GPL actually an issue? The GPL does not apply to anything made with Blender; only changes made to Blender. You can very trivially use Blender without ever dealing with the GPL. Do studios really think they need to make changes/extensions to B…

Current version of GPL is an absolute no go, especially if you need to import an api / sdk style interface into your extensions and tooling - the GPL is viral. You import a GPL library to interface and your stuff is now GPl.

and latest version requires release of encryption keys etc etc - all major studios WANT content protection to work and the GPL is explicit in its attacks on that

Re: Cycles X

#119

Post by franga2000 »

Yay, Blender: Nvidia edition! Not blaming the Blender devs, this is largely AMD's fault, but still... I guess I'll need to get a Threadripper because there's no way I'm dealing with Nvidia on Linux again

Re: Cycles X

#120

Post by bradrn »

regularfry wrote: post #103
blensor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit I am a bit of a masochist in that area but I am almost exclusively using blender on my laptop for many years and once you get used to it and have setup your keys correctly, it works

It's not the trackpad that gets me, it's the reliance on having a number pad that catches me out. Ok, it's not a reliance per se because you can control the view with the on-screen UI, but it's far less immediate that way.

There’s a setting for that: Edit → Preferences → Input → Emulate Numpad (‘Main 1 to 0 keys act as the numpad ones’). I don’t use Blender often, but I always enable this setting on the rare occasions when I use it on a laptop.
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