Blender 3.0 is taking support for AMD GPUs to the next level with the latest Blender 3.0 beta. There is now improved AMD GPU rendering support for Cycles (aka Cycles X).
Blender 3.0
In December, Blender is planning to release version 3.0 of its popular 3D digital content creation (DCC) software suite. The new 3.0 version will support GPU rendering in Blender using the open-source AMD HIP (heterogeneous-computing interface for portability) C++ Runtime API and kernel language, which enables users to take full advantage of all the enhancements of the Blender Cycles X rendering engine on AMD GPUs.
The new rendering engine for Blender removed OpenCL support for GPU rendering on AMD GPUs for technical and performance reasons. AMD supported Blender’s physically-based path tracer, supported on the OpenCL framework. However, the Blender folks are focused on streamlining development in the areas of GPU rendering wherein OpenCL code could be merged with C++ CPU and CUDA code. AMD’s open-source solution handles just that task via HIP.
With the updates to AMD Driver and the Beta version of Blender 3.0 in the preferences users can select HIP for Cycles Render Devices.
HIP is a C++ runtime API and kernel language that allows developers to create portable applications for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from single source code. Another benefit of HIP is it allows the easy migration from existing CUDA code to something more generic.
Beta Driver Now
AMD has support for Blender 3.0 Beta. To tap into the power of Cycles X rendering under the beta version of Blender with AMD graphics cards, an updated AMD Radeon Software driver is needed. This week AMD released a beta driver for Blender 3.0 beta users.
You can download the AMD Radeon Software Beta driver here. And you can download Blender 3.0 Beta here.