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Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level

gpuopen.com

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

#31

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mastax wrote: post #11

It's good that AMD is providing support for some of their customers since OpenCL is being removed in 3.0. I hope that this is just the start of far greater investment into their software ecosystem. It was understandable that AMD invested less in drivers and support software when they were almost bankrupt but that excuse is drying up. There are rumors that future AMD GPU architectures will be quite good and it would b…

They should really get together with Intel on an open standard, now that Intel is doing real GPUs. They both have a shared interest in people not being stuck on proprietary Nvidia interfaces.

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

#32

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #31
mastax wrote: post #11

It's good that AMD is providing support for some of their customers since OpenCL is being removed in 3.0. I hope that this is just the start of far greater investment into their software ecosystem. It was understandable that AMD invested less in drivers and support software when they were almost bankrupt but that excuse is drying up. There are rumors that future AMD GPU architectures will be quite good and it would b…

They should really get together with Intel on an open standard, now that Intel is doing real GPUs. They both have a shared interest in people not being stuck on proprietary Nvidia interfaces.

[deleted]

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

#33

Post by 0des »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #30
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 step…

Is it a 'bad relationship' when you're mistreated every day but the dinner's still tasty?

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

#34

Post by AnthonyMouse »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #30
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 step…

The RX 580 is four years old. The RX 5xxx series is two years old. The current series is RX 6xxx and has competitive performance per watt.

You can't afford to buy one, but the equivalent Nvidia cards are no better. It's a terrible time to buy any GPU. The stupid old RX 580 costs more now than it did when it came out.

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

#35

Post by xvilka »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #31
mastax wrote: post #11

It's good that AMD is providing support for some of their customers since OpenCL is being removed in 3.0. I hope that this is just the start of far greater investment into their software ecosystem. It was understandable that AMD invested less in drivers and support software when they were almost bankrupt but that excuse is drying up. There are rumors that future AMD GPU architectures will be quite good and it would b…

They should really get together with Intel on an open standard, now that Intel is doing real GPUs. They both have a shared interest in people not being stuck on proprietary Nvidia interfaces.

The only hope for opensource only if NVIDIA as a company ceases to exist - go bankrupt, for example. They are inherently hostile to FOSS and will never change (they didn't change in last decades, why they would in the future).

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

#36

Post by AnthonyMouse »

xvilka wrote: post #35
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should really get together with Intel on an open standard, now that Intel is doing real GPUs. They both have a shared interest in people not being stuck on proprietary Nvidia interfaces.

The only hope for opensource only if NVIDIA as a company ceases to exist - go bankrupt, for example. They are inherently hostile to FOSS and will never change (they didn't change in last decades, why they would in the future).

AMD and Intel benefit from having the same open source interface to their GPUs even if Nvidia doesn't use it, because it doubles the amount of target hardware for developers.

Also remember that AMD and Intel both make discrete GPUs and iGPUs but AMD has much more share in discrete GPUs and Intel has much more share in iGPUs, so this helps them both.

And then if either of them managed to hit one out of the park on the hardware side it would benefit both. A really interesting possibility there is to put a strong GPU in a HEDT CPU socket with a lot of memory channels to feed it, because then it shares a memory controller with the CPU and doesn't have to copy over PCIe. That could drive demand, and Nvidia can't do that on a PC without an x86 license but AMD and Intel both can.

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

#37

Post by scoopertrooper »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #31
mastax wrote: post #11

It's good that AMD is providing support for some of their customers since OpenCL is being removed in 3.0. I hope that this is just the start of far greater investment into their software ecosystem. It was understandable that AMD invested less in drivers and support software when they were almost bankrupt but that excuse is drying up. There are rumors that future AMD GPU architectures will be quite good and it would b…

They should really get together with Intel on an open standard, now that Intel is doing real GPUs. They both have a shared interest in people not being stuck on proprietary Nvidia interfaces.

I don't see it happening. AMD like Nvidia want to keep their big corporate clients locked into their ecosystem.

If Intel were clever like a fox, they'd invest heavily in making oneAPI work well on both Nvidia and AMD platforms. As a new market entrant they have nothing to lose, but everything to gain by luring companies into a vendor agnostic solution.

They've already starting doing this to a degree, but only in partnership with some university. This should be one of their major KPIs, they've got plenty of cash laying about.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=oneAPI-A...

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

#38

Post by AnthonyMouse »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #37
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should really get together with Intel on an open standard, now that Intel is doing real GPUs. They both have a shared interest in people not being stuck on proprietary Nvidia interfaces.

I don't see it happening. AMD like Nvidia want to keep their big corporate clients locked into their ecosystem. If Intel were clever like a fox, they'd invest heavily in making oneAPI work well on both Nvidia and AMD platforms. As a new market entrant they have nothing to lose, but everything to gain by luring companies into a vendor agnostic solution. They've already starting doing this to a degree, but only in part…

AMD's biggest problem right now is overcoming Nvidia's inertia for compute. This is the classic case where open standards happen. Everybody but the incumbent joins in, then all of them put together is a large enough target to attract developers.

Then the open standard and the proprietary one coexist as long as any of the vendors implementing the open standard is competitive, but if the vendor with the proprietary standard stumbles in any way, developers abandon them.

Hardware vendors don't really need lock in. People buy your hardware again because you make it faster every year. And if your hardware stops being competitive then the lock in won't save you.

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

#39

Post by boulos »

raphlinus wrote: post #19
my123 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looks like this more about adapt existing CUDA code to work with AMD. So it makes sense as the least resistance approach I suppose. It isn't about that. Vulkan isn't flexible enough to allow it to happen. Give true pointers support in Vulkan for example first. GLSL/HLSL is much worse than modern C++ as a programming language too. As described by Brecht Van Lommel (Blender and Cycles developer): Vulkan has limitatio…

This doesn't sound right to me. Vulkan 1.2 has support for pointers through an extension[1], and that's getting more widely available (certainly a lot more cards than can run ROCm). There's also support coming down the pike for buffer device address[2], which basically lets you use pointers to refer to resources when submitting work to the GPU instead of having to create bindings. If an open source project of this sc…

You'd recommend Vulkan Compute over "CUDA" though for a path tracer? (I don't assume Cycles has any hybrid rendering in it, so there isn't much value in the traditional pipeline)

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

#40

Post by CobaltFire »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #30
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 step…

The overheating and crashing issues are fixed; I’m running a W5700 completely stable.

With the drivers sorted they aren’t significantly behind the 6000 (RDNA2) cards that superseded them. Maybe 5%, equivalent cards compared. Makes for a good deal in today’s market.

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