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by valine 2120 days ago
AMD helped pay for the development of the OpenCL backend for cycles. Before that cycles gpu support was limited to CUDA. They actually hired a developer to work on it full time.
1 comments

As a user of blender on AMD GPUs, they should probably put a little more effort in. Many of the shaders used to render scenes in cycles from 2.82 onward crash, and therefore make it impossible to use an AMD GPU to run cycles.

I'm surprised they don't push their ProRender renderer into the main release. I can't tell if I like it or not

I tried to play with ProRender a while ago, because we had a few people working in Blender who had to suffer with lousy performance on Cycles on our iMacs, but because ProRender requires a bunch of different settings, our artists would have had to migrate existing projects, as well as (potentially) their workflow, to what ProRender supports.

I couldn't tell if that was "everything, but differently" or "most things, occasionally", or some other venn diagram of confusion, and they didn't have time to figure it out because they were busy doing actual work, so we just ended up paying some company that apparently has massive render cluster that you can rent out for basically pennies.

The most common reasons for crashes are outdated graphics drivers with bugs and/or hardware below the minimum requirements [1]. If you think you've found a bug in Blender please report your issue on the bug tracker [2] (Help > Report a Bug in Blender).

[1] https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/ [2] https://developer.blender.org/

Indeed I have actually tracked and posted a few bug reports on the blender forums. I'm running an AMD 5700XT and an R5 3600 so I sure hope my configuration is supported! My only concession is that I had to download the "optional" driver for august in order to get Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 support.
Thank you for reporting bugs and helping improve Blender! Every AMD graphics card that is GCN first generation or later can be used for running Blender [1]. GCN second generation or later is required for GPU rendering [2]. Unfortunately the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT does seems to be affected by some technical issues, that are still under investigation. Might be a bug in Blender or an issue with particular OS, hardware and driver combinations. See ticket T75319 for updates on this problem.

[1] https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/ [2] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_... [3] https://developer.blender.org/T75319