The animation below offers a stunning example of the visual qualities possible with Blender 3.0 with its updated Cycles renderer in combination with AMD’s latest professional workstation GPU, the Radeon Pro W6800.
The animation—produced by Mike Pan at Pixelary—is a showcase of the support for technologies in AMD graphics cards in Blender 3.0.
Formula One History
Part of the reason for the creation of the animation was the achievements in Formula One in 2021. Noted as one of the most exciting seasons in racing in Formula One history, 2021 delivered edge-of-your-seat excitement with down-to-the-wire finishes in both championships.
Various views from the stunning Blender 3.0 Cycles Rendered animation powered by AMD Radeon Pro W6800 GPUs using AMD HIP API technology. (Image: AMD)
AMD’s partners at Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1™ Team finished the season on top, cementing a world-breaking eight consecutive FIA Formula One Constructors’ Championships. Celebrations were in order.
So AMD partnered with The Pixelary to create a stunning 3D animation of the championship-winning race car—the Mercedes-AMG F1 W12 E Performance. (see the animation below).
Blender Cycles Renderer
Blender’s Cycles Renderer was used in the vivid animation below. The team had to first convert and adapt the car asset from a previous rendering project that used Radeon ProRender. Because Radeon ProRender already used Blender’s native shader network, the materials carried over and just worked in Cycles.
What has transpired in Blender 2.9x is the old OpenCL backend has been replaced by the AMD HIP API (Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability). What AMD HIP allows is for Cycles to be developed using a single unified code path for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs and CPUs. With greater feature parity between processors (both CPUs and GPUs) from different vendors, AMD’s technology streamlines Cycle’s code path and simplifies end-user hardware deployment for Cycles renderings.
AMD’s latest Radeon Pro W6000 series GPUs with their AMD RDNA 2 architecture propel AMD HIP environment. So Cycles is really fast and this animation below was rendered using AMD Radeon Pro W6800 GPUs. Take a look by clicking on the animation. To learn more visit the AMD blog on the project.
