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Comment by de6u99er | Hacker News Reader

Looks like AMD's open source strategy is starting to pay off.

Not really on the compute side yet. This is their 2nd attempt at supporting Blender as the first (an OpenCL renderer for Blender) was deemed unmaintainable and deprecated shortly after it was released. All indications are AMD is doing much better on the video driver side (which is where the good news is), but on the compute side they appear to have a long way to go still.

AMD may be doing better on the open source video driver side but their Windows drivers have been a mess for half a decade.

Maybe they can write the inverse of NDIS wrapper and make Linux amdgpu + radv run own Windows instead?

How?? I've had zero problems with the Windows driver in the last 5 years or so.

They likely mean the GUI settings interface that competes with the GeForce Control Panel, not the driver itself.

I sometimes pass a W3100 through to a Windows VM so I only know the Radeon Pro interface, but I do feel like its designer's last project may have been building an AOL prog in Flash.

I wouldn't go that far. Nvidia and even Intel have had hardware-accelerated features in Blender (RTX-acceleration and Optix, respectively), so this is more about getting them back on the same level. I do really like AMD GPUs though, I'd be interested to see how this performs on their APUs with the Vega graphics.

OptiX is not an Intel technology, both CUDA and OptiX rendering backends for Blender's Cycles are powered by Nvidia.

They probably meant the Intel denoiser bundled with Blender.

OptiX is not an Intel technology

Probably meant Embree

According to other posts, this won’t support Vega graphics; RDNA1 is the absolute minimum, with RDNA2 being the oldest architecture officially supported. Guess we’ll have to wait for new APUs to see how this fares.

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