AMD’s Vega Discrete Mobile GPUs only found use in Apple’s Macbook line of laptops and RDNA1/RDNA2 is AMD’s focus now but what about 5 generations of Ryzen APUs that use Vega Graphics.

Cycles-X, like the original Cycles in Blender, sees AMD only coming in late and after the fact and skipping too much of the AMD Polaris/Vega Graphics hardware that’s still more numerous than any Ryzen Laptops sporting RDNA1/RDNA2 discrete mobile GPUs. I Think that Eevee rendering and Vulkan Accelerated Ray Tracing may be the only option for older AMD Polaris/Vega graphics and currently Vega Integrated graphics is the only integrated graphics on any AMD APUs.

The MESA folks on Linux need an OpenCL over Vulkan compute layer so folks can more easily run AMD’s GPUs/Graphics under Blender 2.8 up to but not including Blender 3.0 where OpenCL support is not included.

Hopefully there can be some attention paid to Polaris and Vega graphics on Laptops because Nvidia still dominates on Discrete Mobile and Discrete graphics in general if one goes over to Techgage and reads the latest RDNA2 Pro Graphics Cards reviews where AMD’s got some work to do with Blender just enabling hardware ray tracing via some API there. AMD’s competing with Nvidia on some limited workflows but for rendering with ray tracing via Nvidia’s OptiX Nvidia is the clear winner there!