Problem with Blender Cycles rendering using my GPU

Hi there, so recently I’ve stumbled into a serious issue. For the past 4 months I was able to render scenes of various sizes and setups without a major problem, however, all that was a subject to change in the past few days. I started to get the following error: “OpenCL error: CL_MEM_OBJECT_ALLOCATION_FAILURE in clENqueueBuffer(cqCommandQueue, CL_MEM_PTR(mem.device_pointer), CL_TRUE, 0, size(void*)mem.data_pointer, 0, NULL, NULL)” even when I try to render the most simple scene containing one cube without an HDRi using my Radeon R9 270, rendering works fine with my CPU but my GPU is having major issues. I don’t think that there is a problem with my GPU because like I said it was working fine in the past but now all of a sudden it doesn’t anymore.

Let me just give you another important information, the error doesn’t occur every time I start blender, it works fine the first time but when I try to render something the second time regardless if that scene is the same one or another one from a second file the error happens again. But If I were to exit Blender and start it again, the software doesn’t have a problem with rendering the first time using my GPU.

I’ve already tested out and ruled out a couple of things: the scene, resolution, sampling amount and other important settings in render panels are not the cause, I can minimize it as much as I want to but the error is persistent. Simplify also doesn’t help since like I said a simple scene with one cube un-subdivide won’t render and I’ve rendered scenes in the past using my GPU that had about 2 000 000 polygons. I would send you my files and setup but I don’t see how that would help since the issue only began with Blender couple of days ago when Blender all of a sudden crashed alongside my display driver in a really intense scene and I wasn’t even rendering anything I just moved an empty that was a parent of a high poly mesh that had a subdivision modifier on it.

I guess I should reinstall Blender and see if that changes anything?

What OS? Could e. g. Win 10 have updated the graphics driver without your knowledge?

Oh yeah, sorry. It is Windows 10. And I don’t think its my drivers at fault here since I’ve managed to turn off Windows 10 updating without asking for my permission but I could be wrong.

Edit: I’ve checked the date of my GPU driver and it’s 4/24/2017, and the version is 22.19.162.4.

It has nothing to do with the OS and/or the GPU Driver. Your Card´s core does not support GCN-Architecture 2nd Gen, which is used by Blender for the Open-CL rendering on AMD GPU´s.

If you want to do rendering on the GPU you should buy a new Card, and if so, I would buy a Nvidia GPU. Nvida saved me a lot of Headaches, but these are just my 2 cents.

Maybe someone else can say a word on the last Gen AMD Cards in relation to Blender.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html

I am aware that an Nvidia graphics would be a better choice not just because the aforementioned problems but also because cycles features like the volume shaders that are not supported by AMD GPU’s, or at least the one that I have.

Thank you for answering this puzzle, Polygonaut. But I still don’t understand why did this problem only occur all of a sudden after couple of months of rendering even though I have successfully rendering heavier scenes?

But I still don’t understand why did this problem only occur all of a sudden after couple of months of rendering even though I have successfully rendering heavier scenes?

Maybe it was just luck I guess, sorry I can not tell you exactly why it worked before.

Use previous builds before this ‘limit’ got implemented. More…
[Bf-blender-cvs] [1f0998baa79] master: Cycles: Blacklist unsupported OpenCL devices

PS. It helps to be aware about what happens to the master/daily builds, don’t walk blindly through the valley of the shadow of blend :ba: