Hi Blender forum.
its near time for a serious PC upgrade, I’d like to know your opinions on AMD cards. If anyone is using AMD please give me some insight if they work well with Blender. I mainly am a novice user, and will be modelling still images and occasionally some basic animations. I feel that NVIDIA is a bit too expensive for what they give and promise.
thank you.
I have mainly RX Vega 64’s in my system (few - varies as i tweak the system)
SO overall it works. There is nothing majorly wrong with them.
NOTE : October 28th is AMD’s announcement on next gen AMD GPU’s (with Mid November most likely formal release) Should have raytracing hardware support.
Still if you need a system today.
Reasons.
RTX gives a near 2x boost over regular CUDA rendering. So even if one of the GPU’s might be on “par” with AMD’s current GPU’s, Optix (RTX supprot) render simply puts AMD currently far back.
Else wait till after AMD annouces their RDNA2. And day following (october 29th) nvidias release of the 3070.
Then we’ll have a very good view of what is best for the next little while.
Still check out latest tests.
idk if this helps or not
Thanks for your reply. I’m surely going to wait a bit and see if AMD has come up with something substantial with their GPUs. Since I’m going to build a PC I want something decent.
Kind regards.
I’ll add one “negative” point.
And that falls on Blender team itself. Implementing AMD was always “second” to many other things.
OpenCL rendeirng wasn’t fixed for a long time after implementation, and one of AMD’s engineers provided code update that was used to allow proper renders. Will admit at that time team was small, so they had to prioritize features that would impact most users.
Still even now, with dedicated funding from AMD, there has been next to no major work done.
In the past there was even a noticeable performance degradation in Cycles rendering speed (this was around 2.8 release.
Even though bug was reported and team knew of it. It took two releases before it got back to same performance.
And many other bugs in the past that took very very long time to fix as they prioritized Nvidia and new Blender features.
So this is my main concern right now. Even if AMD implements Ray Tracing cores, it will take a bit of time before it shows up in Blender.
In part I understand as Nvidai simply owns the GPU market. But unsure how this will change with the new AMD’s (if at all …)
Another downside is that OpenCL cannot use precompiled Kernels in Cycles as is possible with CUDA. In my case, that would be the main disadvantage when choosing AMD (Apart from the fact that ATI drivers in Linux give a lot of headaches)
Well you guys certainly did shed some light. So I’ll get go with NVIDIA based GPU card to make sure I can have maximum performance with no dramas. AMD does sound tempting considering there CPUs and GPUs are more affordable. I know for sure I’ll getting a AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT 3.9 GHz 8-Core Processor, 64GB of RAM, now regarding the GPU it’ll be an NVIDIA of some sort, with minimum 8GB.