when would we see official support for maxwell, 900?

Support Technical Support
1

i know cuda 5.0 is already supported officially, so wouldn’t it be easy to just add 980, 970 official release into the blender 2.72?
but it turns out that no, so would we need to wait half a year more to get official release on gtx 900 series? (blender 2.73 official release)

2

Hi 1832vin
I just looked it up: the current Cuda sdk that Blender uses is ver. 6.5 which is the latest official sdk from Nvidia but for the release of the gtx 9xx series they made a special build of the sdk ver 6.5 that supports these cards. It can be downloaded here: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads-geforce-gtx9xx

Building Blender with it shouldn’t be to difficult because blender is already enabled for maxwell cards. It already supports the gtx 750ti that I have. I don’t know when they will support it though, probably with the next release of the sdk.

Maybe I will try to build one tonight, I am interested in the render times of these cards :slight_smile:

Edit: I just found that the version for the new gtx9xx series is sm_52 while currently Blender supports only up to sm_50

3

@OscarM, kernel for sm_52 cards build fine with the toolkit from your link.
@1832vin, it is only some work to add the new toolkit to the build environment for the buildbots.
If OscarM success with his build he can share the kernel for all Windows user.
Btw. The Blender release cycles is two months, 2.72 cycle was longer because of GSOC and a bunch of new features.

Cheers, mib

4

Ok I was able to build it but it did take a bit more time because I didn’t know I had to edit the kernel.cu file LOL.

You can download the build from my google drive and for the peoples who only want the cubin I created a separate archive for it. To decompress it you need 7zip: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5iIGdwkkLmCQ0w4NkktaDlMRk0&usp=sharing

After a bit of additional research I found out you can rename the sm_50 cubin to sm_52 to run it on the newer cards. Source: https://developer.blender.org/T41910

5

Hi OscarM, the major question is: Is there a performance difference between the native sm_52 and the renamed sm_50 kernel. :slight_smile:

Thanks, mib

6

Good question, I cant tell because I don’t own the card but people with the card can test it now if it makes a difference :slight_smile:

7

Dingto made a temporary fix that makes Blender use the sm_50 kernel for the gtx 9xx cards. The next buildbot build should probably have the fix.

8

Big difference, renamed sm5.0 kernel is about 30% slower than dingto’s first build. Haven’t tested newer versions yet.