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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Can't wait to pair my Threadripper with an Intel GPU :D Now NVidia, please release an x64 processor to have a complete mix on the market.

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The advantage of Intel drivers is their support of virtual GPUs which neither AMD or NVIDIA support for consumer graphics cards.

I rather they fix their GPU drivers by open sourcing them, or AMD.

AMD's Linux stack is not only completely open source, most of it is in-kernel and maintained by AMD devs.

Try to use OpenCL and you will need blobs. It's major pain to use blender(requires OpenCL if you want to finish render today) not long time ago their blob crashed on new versions libdrm.

The blobs are probably the most stable option right now, but Clover exists (and kinda sucks) and the new cool option is the fully open ROCm stack which does include OpenCL.

> requires OpenCL if you want to finish render today

honestly, modern CPUs aren't that far behind in Cycles rendering

I'm using RocM OpenCL right now, which I believe is the approved option, or will be. Personally I've not had any issues with it - I can certainly use Blender with it, although the performance right now is so-so (I only have a cheap APU though, so hardly surprising).

I don't believe I have any blobs, other than the firmware one, which is true regardless - can you tell me what blobs you mean?

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opencl-amd/

this one, part of amdgpu-pro

I can confirm I don't have that installed. I'm using this: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm-OpenCL-Runtime

Edit: actually Blender performance is decent, but the kernels take ~10 minutes to compile.

That's only for new stuff, right? Older GPUs are still stuck with radeon or wonky proprietary drivers?

AMD's GCN architecture is about 7 years old and fully supported. Open source support for the previous TeraScale architecture is reportedly fairly good too, though no Vulkan.

Pity that to use those I would need to replace my laptop, meanwhile the DirectX 11 driver still works.

I thought amdgpu only officially supported GCN 1.2 and later, which is more like 4.5 years old?

My understanding is that the best AMD Vulkan implementation is still the indipendently developed one as AMD took forever to open source their own.

No, it requires nonfree firmware to be loaded by the driver.

There were rumours of Nvidia having an x86 variant of their Denver core but killed it because of licensing. I wonder how true that is.

https://semiaccurate.com/2011/08/05/what-is-project-denver-b...

I wonder if nvidia could even compete with a high-end ARM cpu. Windows runs on ARM these days. Server software runs on ARM. So it would "just" be a matter of getting the performance right.

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