We will have more to share about our support in December when Blender 3.0 is expected to be launched. As this is a beta release of both our driver and Blender 3.0, our support for Cycles X is currently in preview. Today we are releasing a Windows beta driver for users who wish to test out our support for Cycles X in the latest Blender 3.0 Beta release. To use this with a supported AMD graphics card an updated AMD Radeon Software driver is needed. AMD has been working closely with Blender to add support for HIP devices in Blender 3.0, and this code already available in the latest daily Blender 3.0 beta release. The other advantage is that the tools with HIP allow easy migration from existing CUDA code to something more generic. This allows the Blender Cycles developers to write one set of rendering kernels and run them across multiple devices. HIP (Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability) is a C++ Runtime API and kernel language that allows developers to create portable applications for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from a single source code.

Luckily, AMD has an open-source solution for developers just for that.

In short, with Cycles X, they were looking for a way to compile a single codebase that could be used on all the different devices Cycles can render on, including AMD graphics cards. However, moving forward our partners at Blender were hoping to merge the separate OpenCL code with the C++ CPU and CUDA rendering code. OpenCL is a C-based programming language that allows running programs on many GPUs which support it. Previous versions of Cycles, Blender’s physically-based path tracer, supported rendering via the OpenCL framework. To help address this, AMD has been working very closely with Blender to improve support for GPU rendering in Blender using the AMD HIP API, to ensure users of AMD graphics cards can take advantage of all the enhancements found in Cycles X.įor AMD GPUs, this will be in Blender 3.0, expected in December 2021. This removed OpenCL support for rendering on AMD GPUs for technical and performance reasons. Blender 3.0 was announced with some rewrites to the rendering engine Cycles (AKA Cycles X). We have some exciting developments to share about AMD graphics card support. With improved AMD GPU rendering support in Cycles. Blender 3.0 takes support for AMD GPUs to the next level.

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