Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

gpuopen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 117 posts

Re: Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

#21

Post by Hemospectrum »

smoldesu wrote: post #4
de6u99er wrote: post #3

Looks like AMD's open source strategy is starting to pay off.

I wouldn't go that far. Nvidia and even Intel have had hardware-accelerated features in Blender (RTX-acceleration and Optix, respectively), so this is more about getting them back on the same level. I do really like AMD GPUs though, I'd be interested to see how this performs on their APUs with the Vega graphics.

According to other posts, this won’t support Vega graphics; RDNA1 is the absolute minimum, with RDNA2 being the oldest architecture officially supported. Guess we’ll have to wait for new APUs to see how this fares.

Re: Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

#25

Post by slavik81 »

my123 wrote: post #15
EFruit wrote: post #12

Two major questions come to mind: 1. What will the impact be for ROCm's Navi support on Linux? 2. Does this mean they're getting more confident at handling simultaneous display AND compute with ROCm?

> 1. What will the impact be for ROCm's Navi support on Linux? You will see that supported officially in ROCm 5.0, the next ROCm release. Note that ROCm 5.0 drops support for first generation Vega GPUs. (Radeon Instinct MI25) The only consumer card to have shipped with second gen Vega is the Radeon VII.

All future plans are subject to change, but official Navi21 support is expected in ROCm 5.0. It's been shipping unofficially since ROCm 4.2.

Official Navi support (5000-series cards), however, is expected in a later release. In current releases, I think the only ROCm library shipping unofficial support is rocBLAS.

(I work for AMD on ROCm. All opinions are my own.)

Re: Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

#26

Post by KennyBlanken »

blihp wrote: post #17
de6u99er wrote: post #3

Looks like AMD's open source strategy is starting to pay off.

Not really on the compute side yet. This is their 2nd attempt at supporting Blender as the first (an OpenCL renderer for Blender) was deemed unmaintainable and deprecated shortly after it was released. All indications are AMD is doing much better on the video driver side (which is where the good news is), but on the compute side they appear to have a long way to go still.

AMD may be doing better on the open source video driver side but their Windows drivers have been a mess for half a decade.

Re: Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

#27

Post by philovivero »

jjoonathan wrote: post #9

Glad to hear it. We're going on 10 years since Blender notionally got OpenCL support, I bought an AMD GPU on that basis, found out that the "OpenCL support" was so thoroughly dismal that it was slower than my CPU, sold my AMD card, ate the ebay fees, bought an NVidia card, ate the green tax, and got on with my work. I had to repeat that lesson a few years later with deep learning code before it stuck. Hopefully this…

I wish I could be that guinea pig, but looks like this is a Windows-only thing, and I'm on a Mac.

Re: Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

#28

Post by mjevans »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #26
blihp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really on the compute side yet. This is their 2nd attempt at supporting Blender as the first (an OpenCL renderer for Blender) was deemed unmaintainable and deprecated shortly after it was released. All indications are AMD is doing much better on the video driver side (which is where the good news is), but on the compute side they appear to have a long way to go still.

AMD may be doing better on the open source video driver side but their Windows drivers have been a mess for half a decade.

Maybe they can write the inverse of NDIS wrapper and make Linux amdgpu + radv run own Windows instead?

Re: Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

#29

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ldehaan wrote: post #24

When amd can compete with Nvidia in this space they'll both be the same price. Just buy nvidia.

They might both be the same price, but the price will be lower, because that's how competition works. Which only happens if you support the underdog.

Re: Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

#30

Post by KennyBlanken »

jjoonathan wrote: post #9

Glad to hear it. We're going on 10 years since Blender notionally got OpenCL support, I bought an AMD GPU on that basis, found out that the "OpenCL support" was so thoroughly dismal that it was slower than my CPU, sold my AMD card, ate the ebay fees, bought an NVidia card, ate the green tax, and got on with my work. I had to repeat that lesson a few years later with deep learning code before it stuck. Hopefully this…

Is it a 'green tax' when NVIDIA's product is superior in almost every way? There's only two negatives to NVIDIA products right now: poor MacOS support and their linux drivers aren't quite as good as AMD's.

Everything compute uses NVIDIA/OptiX.

AMD's Windows drivers suck. I had no end of problems with games crashing and micro-stuttering. I used DDU to remove the old drivers, ran Tron, all sorts of troubleshooting steps. Switching to an NVIDIA card fixed it. Can't remember the last time a game crashed on me.

AMD's GPUs use significantly more power in their class. The RX 580 is a 185W TDP card. NVIDIA's 1060 is 120W and outperforms the RX 580. The 1070 is a 150W card and handily outperforms the 580. The 1070TI is still (slightly) under the RX580 (by 5W), and wipes the floor with it.

The 5xxx series cards were also garbage. AMD had nothing to respond to DLSS or RTX - and the RTX cards were a huge leap in compute performance in particular. The cards crashed like crazy because of driver problems, and people also discovered that all the "creators" with pre-release cards had been basing their performance tests off benchmark runs that lasted just long enough before the cards overheated. NVIDIA cards performed better if you planned on gaming for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Post reply on HN