So AMD is has chipped in even more and will support 2 new DEV’s to add new technologies (that of course AMD supports) Key part being Vulkan.
Seeing how Apple had dropped support for it’s creation, and overall stale development of OpenCL in Blender, this is a very good move indeed.
It all depends how quickly the DEV’s are hired and how quickly they will actually integrate Vulkan. But does that mean we’re stuck with limited OpenCL growth till Vuklan goes live? I have a feeling yes.
It should be easy migration, consider Vulkan is support on Windows with nvidia driver and probably AMD driver. Vulkan should give EEVEE access to the RT core on the RTX cards, so if they want to implement real-time GI they can now, this was impossible with OpenGL.
Once you experience real-time GI, shadow, AO its hard to go back to lightmap baking.
The Godot demos that reduz has been showing use voxel cone tracing for the gi, ao and reflections. There may be some realtime raytracing in the future but that is a long way off.
Just watched the “Ask the Dev” from Blender Conference. And now unsure.
I know Vulcan has both programmable like OpenCL, but primary it was created to replace OpenGL.
During the session, when asked about Vulkan, they only stated as a replacement to OpenGL… no mention of OpenCL compute for Cycles… As such did anyone hear/read any official note on OpenCL (not OpenGL)?
I believe ROCm is Linux only. HiP is AMD’s move to make porting of CUDA Apps straight forward.
I’d love to know why Windows support is not mentioned? Maybe it’s because the main battle ground ($) will be in the server space which is why AMD is concentrating on that?
WRT Vulkan replacing OpenCL, there’s talk of that but I think there are questions whether Vulkan is capable enough in certain areas. It’s certainly OK for realtime ray tracing applications but full path traced quality I think the jury is still out.
Aren’t both? But I’ve seen some AMD devs basically say that they don’t know ofif or when but it could be ported to windows as well. It’s just that ROCm/HIP is primarily targeting HPC and who uses windows for that?
