Looking for users with recent AMD GPU graphics cards

Hiya,

So, been busy hashing out OpenCL performance for Raytraced on AMD GPUs. I am coming at a point where I’d like to get some users to run some tests for me. As per title I’d prefer these kind of cards, but anything with GCN 2 or newer should work (but lower-end cards we have plenty here at the office to test with).

I’ll let this thread hang around during the weekend, and activate then on next Monday, December 11th with some more specifics. So please during the weekend join here the AMD GPU Guinea Pig Render User Army.

Thanks,

/Nathan ‘Supreme Commander’ Letwory

1 Like

Wouldn’t AMD be happy to send you some cards? That’s return on investment, right?
They already finance a developer for blender and also send them hardware. So if that investment doesn’t lead to their hardware being supported by Rhino6 (which now utilizes software which is funded by them), well that would be quit a bad ROI.

Just ask this Roosendaal guy for his contact at AMD. Can’t imagine AMD rejecting your request.
Of course you would want the Pro card as well :wink:

Sure, the point is also to get data from The Real World. I have made progress on my machine. It will help in determining better settings when I can get more users with different setups do some testing.

Relatively soon I should have access to some good cards, but even then I prefer to get some users to do some specific tests, including changing some settings and rerunning tests.

Well here at my home system the RX460 still doesn’t work at all, raytraced just doesn’t kick in, seems stuck at compiling.
So I might un- and reinstall rhino-beta here to check. wasn’t there something with kernel stuff in windows, maybe I have to change something again?

EDIT:
If you don’t have the time to deal with the cards - make AMD send them to me, I’d gladly be you guinea pig :grin:

Also don’t wonder why there are so few AMD users here. You basically told everyone, that AMD is crap and has broken drivers. That’s why I bought the GTX1060 for the office.

The current beta indeed has non-working OpenCL. You and any participant will be getting a special build for testing with the fixes necessary to have a working version.

I quite like my RX 550. It is the display driver since I got it, and will be so for the foreseeable future. Probably any of the new cards I’ll have access to as well. Again, the main point of the exercise is to get tests on non-developer machines. Any discussion on the merits, pros and cons of any brand GPU we can conduct in a separate thread.

Users with AMD GPUs interested in testing OpenCL fixes please reply in this thread. Preferrably with HW setup, Windows version and driver version.

Any other issues please post in a new thread.

Thank you,

/Nathan

Let me be clear here - we have lots of AMD cards, many of them supplied by AMD - who have been extremely generous and supportive of our development efforts, both with Cycles development and also the general display dev.

There are a couple of reasons why we need to involve users in this part of the process. The first - that Nathan has already touched on - is that there will be a better spread of systems than just our development workstations.

But perhaps more important is that we are merging quite a bit of new code into Cycles to support OpenCL, and that will be shipped in one of the first service releases of Rhino. Lots of new code requires lots of testing - and while we have in house resources to do that, involving users in the process is a key part of our way of doing things.

The testing phases for the service releases are quite short, so what we’re doing here is really an attempt to create a special “WIP” process for this piece of SR1.

We hope you’ll support us to ensure that the first OpenCL capable Cycles implementation in Rhino is stable and fast.

  • Andy
4 Likes

sitting at the system with RX460 at the moment. is that special versions already available? would be interesting to see if renderspeed has improved since last time cycles worked on the card. back then it felt very slow. should be roughly half as fast as my GTX1060 on the other system. would be nice if it’s at that level now.

I made a booboo with the installer changes, it looks like not all necessary auxiliary files are included. Next week I hope to have a better job done. But the speed really is much better at least on my RX 480. I have actually switched back to using that more now. It still isn’t a GTX 1060, but it isn’t eye-bleeding slow anymore. I’ll let you know. Thanks for your patience (something AMD GPU users generally are good at, since they have had to practice it :wink: )

I wouldn’t mind getting some more users join the testing effort. Rendering on AMD cards now seems to be working well on my dev machine, but I’d like to ensure it Actually Works On Customer Machines as well.

So anyone with an AMD GPU card that is at least GCN 2nd generation (since earlier cards are blacklisted by Cycles - check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units to see if you fit), please speak up if you want to give Raytraced on your cool AMD GPU a go.

/Nathan

p.s. it’ll be like early Christmas.