How to use a AMD GPU with Cycles OpenCL rendering (tutorial), working features


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Dec 27 2014 edit: This video contains some info that’s getting out of date! AMD’s OpenCL drivers continue to improve and with the latest 2014 “Omega drivers” things are looking better, but ultimately Blender’s OpenCL rendering is in need of rewrite… If you still want to use OpenCL with Blender, atm I’d suggest using version 2.69 for the best performance. Personally I’m much more interested in Luxrender’s OpenCL implementation. Luxmark v.3 Beta1 OpenCL benchmark: http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=11426

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A small tutorial showing how to enable working OpenCL GPU rendering in Cycles – notice this is highly experimental…

If you want to know whats going on in the video turn on HD and read the annotations* 🙂
Btw this all shouldn’t be any news but I uploaded this video anyway … maybe to those whose attention this has escaped.

Working in 2.62:
-all shaders
-lamps
-procedural textures
-displacement

Not working:
-Image textures
-Multi GPU rendering (why..? Well you can open own instances of Blender for both cards tho)

Use Blender release 2.62 for the best functionality in Cycles. If you don’t have much RAM you probably cannot compile the kernels with textures etc, watch that your memory usage doesn’t exceed what’s available with task manager. With low ram your best bet is to try 2.63 release version with only SVN and Emission defined, as I did in this vid for comparison to “all” kernel.

03:48 compiling “all kernels” for 2.62 (took 4min 30 sec in real time and 13Gb ram)
05:35 compiling “light kernels” (=SVN + Emision) for 2.63 (took 18 seconds and 4Gb ram)
06:31 showing things working in 2.62 🙂

I hope this video helped if you were looking for this information, if so like, cheers.

*Btw if you don’t enable emission kernels compile in a couple of seconds and few Mb ram.

GPU(s): radeon hd 7850
AMD driver: 13.2 beta 7
CPU: i7 3820
OS: Win 7 64bit

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