4 ms·

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

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 time is different. I'm cautiously optimistic... but I'll let someone else be the guinea pig.

moffkalast 5y ago
This is mostly why I've stopped buying anything but Nvidia GPUs years ago, in 99% of software people just support CUDA and call it a day it seems.
philovivero 5y ago
I wish I could be that guinea pig, but looks like this is a Windows-only thing, and I'm on a Mac.
- tomovo 5y ago
  Apple is contributing Metal support so there’s another chance.
  - techdragon 5y ago
    Only because the move to their own customised ARM based unified memory architecture means that if they don’t want to completely hemorrhage the remaining loyal customers in the pro market paying for their hardware they have to support at least basic hardware acceleration in these apps. So don’t expect support on anything but the latest hardware. Like their new Metal based Machine learning library junk. Oh whats that you have an Intel Mac with a beefy external GPU supported by Metal… too bad this is M1 only! Doesn’t matter that we supported this in the beta, we’re throwing out everything Intel related because the future is ARM and we no longer care about anything outside our garden. I say all of this grumpily, as a progressively less and less happy Apple customer. Unless a glorious future of high performance x86 emulation of Virtual machines happens I’m forced to get cheaper hardware and buy a second laptop now in order to support GPU heavy windows software (Linux at least looks set to get some measure of support so hopefully it’s not all dire, but it’s still a massive down side for me in the otherwise amazing looking ARM hardware)
    - my123 5y ago
      > Like their new Metal based Machine learning library junk. Oh whats that you have an Intel Mac with a beefy external GPU supported by Metal… too bad this is M1 only Note that it’s temporary (as of today) because of bugs in Intel’s Metal graphics drivers. AMD GPUs are supported on TensorFlow/MLCompute. This is not M1 only, just Intel GPUs are excluded.
- knolan 5y ago
  I’ve a 2019 16” and the only way to make good use of my AMD GPU with Blender is with AMD’s Radeon Pro Renderer. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender
KennyBlanken 5y ago
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.
- neogodless 5y ago
  If anyone is reading this and wondering, I've run a Radeon RX 5600 XT for about 16 months with no issues at all. Fan noise is super well controlled (Sapphire Pulse three fan model.) Power draw was generally below 115 W. (Performance is roughly comparable to a GeForce RTX 2060.) More recently, I upgraded to a 6700 XT. Rock solid stable, excellent performance, great cooling. Haven't really watched power draw closely, but I think it might be closer to 130-150 W. I'll try to remember to check this when I play games after work today. But if you care, you'll go read reviews anyway! (Performance is roughly comparable to a GeForce RTX 3070.) Both were/are powered by a 13 year old Corsair 620W power supply. Almost all my gaming is done at 1440p.
- 0des 5y ago
  Is it a 'bad relationship' when you're mistreated every day but the dinner's still tasty?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  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.

moffkalast 5y ago

This is mostly why I've stopped buying anything but Nvidia GPUs years ago, in 99% of software people just support CUDA and call it a day it seems.

philovivero 5y ago

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

tomovo 5y ago
Apple is contributing Metal support so there’s another chance.
- techdragon 5y ago
  Only because the move to their own customised ARM based unified memory architecture means that if they don’t want to completely hemorrhage the remaining loyal customers in the pro market paying for their hardware they have to support at least basic hardware acceleration in these apps. So don’t expect support on anything but the latest hardware. Like their new Metal based Machine learning library junk. Oh whats that you have an Intel Mac with a beefy external GPU supported by Metal… too bad this is M1 only! Doesn’t matter that we supported this in the beta, we’re throwing out everything Intel related because the future is ARM and we no longer care about anything outside our garden. I say all of this grumpily, as a progressively less and less happy Apple customer. Unless a glorious future of high performance x86 emulation of Virtual machines happens I’m forced to get cheaper hardware and buy a second laptop now in order to support GPU heavy windows software (Linux at least looks set to get some measure of support so hopefully it’s not all dire, but it’s still a massive down side for me in the otherwise amazing looking ARM hardware)
  - my123 5y ago
    > Like their new Metal based Machine learning library junk. Oh whats that you have an Intel Mac with a beefy external GPU supported by Metal… too bad this is M1 only Note that it’s temporary (as of today) because of bugs in Intel’s Metal graphics drivers. AMD GPUs are supported on TensorFlow/MLCompute. This is not M1 only, just Intel GPUs are excluded.
knolan 5y ago
I’ve a 2019 16” and the only way to make good use of my AMD GPU with Blender is with AMD’s Radeon Pro Renderer. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender

KennyBlanken 5y ago

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.

neogodless 5y ago
If anyone is reading this and wondering, I've run a Radeon RX 5600 XT for about 16 months with no issues at all. Fan noise is super well controlled (Sapphire Pulse three fan model.) Power draw was generally below 115 W. (Performance is roughly comparable to a GeForce RTX 2060.) More recently, I upgraded to a 6700 XT. Rock solid stable, excellent performance, great cooling. Haven't really watched power draw closely, but I think it might be closer to 130-150 W. I'll try to remember to check this when I play games after work today. But if you care, you'll go read reviews anyway! (Performance is roughly comparable to a GeForce RTX 3070.) Both were/are powered by a 13 year old Corsair 620W power supply. Almost all my gaming is done at 1440p.
0des 5y ago
Is it a 'bad relationship' when you're mistreated every day but the dinner's still tasty?
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
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.