Blender won't recognize the Radeon R9 390 as an OpenCL device

Greetings! Today I got my new video card. It is a Radeon XFX R9 390 8GB. It’s working great so far, but there is one issue: Blender does not detect it as an OpenCL compute device for Cycles rendering. I previously had a GCN 1.0 card, which I understand was unsupported thus I didn’t pursue it further… this one however is GCN 2.0, Blender should support it and there are already videos of people rendering on it:


I’m immediately assuming this is because I’m a Linux user, and I’m also using the free video drivers rather than the proprietary ones. My version of Mesa is 18.1.7 (amdgpu driver), Blender 2.79b, running on Linux openSUSE Tumbleweed x64.

Does anyone know what I’m missing and can help with instructions for this OS? Please however don’t suggest installing proprietary drivers: I’m fine with those and don’t wish to ruin my system.

Here is the output of the ‘clinfo’ command:

mircea@linux-qz0r:~> clinfo
Number of platforms                               1
  Platform Name                                   Clover
  Platform Vendor                                 Mesa
  Platform Version                                OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 18.1.7
  Platform Profile                                FULL_PROFILE
  Platform Extensions                             cl_khr_icd
  Platform Extensions function suffix             MESA

  Platform Name                                   Clover
Number of devices                                 1
  Device Name                                     AMD Radeon (TM) R9 390 Series (HAWAII, DRM 3.26.0, 4.18.9-1-default, LLVM 6.0.1)
  Device Vendor                                   AMD
  Device Vendor ID                                0x1002
  Device Version                                  OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 18.1.7
  Driver Version                                  18.1.7
  Device OpenCL C Version                         OpenCL C 1.1 
  Device Type                                     GPU
  Device Profile                                  FULL_PROFILE
  Device Available                                Yes
  Compiler Available                              Yes
  Max compute units                               40
  Max clock frequency                             1015MHz
  Max work item dimensions                        3
  Max work item sizes                             256x256x256
  Max work group size                             256
  Preferred work group size multiple              64
  Preferred / native vector sizes                 
    char                                                16 / 16      
    short                                                8 / 8       
    int                                                  4 / 4       
    long                                                 2 / 2       
    half                                                 8 / 8        (cl_khr_fp16)
    float                                                4 / 4       
    double                                               2 / 2        (cl_khr_fp64)
  Half-precision Floating-point support           (cl_khr_fp16)
    Denormals                                     No
    Infinity and NANs                             Yes
    Round to nearest                              Yes
    Round to zero                                 No
    Round to infinity                             No
    IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add               No
    Support is emulated in software               No
  Single-precision Floating-point support         (core)
    Denormals                                     No
    Infinity and NANs                             Yes
    Round to nearest                              Yes
    Round to zero                                 No
    Round to infinity                             No
    IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add               No
    Support is emulated in software               No
    Correctly-rounded divide and sqrt operations  No
  Double-precision Floating-point support         (cl_khr_fp64)
    Denormals                                     Yes
    Infinity and NANs                             Yes
    Round to nearest                              Yes
    Round to zero                                 Yes
    Round to infinity                             Yes
    IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add               Yes
    Support is emulated in software               No
  Address bits                                    64, Little-Endian
  Global memory size                              8589934592 (8GiB)
  Error Correction support                        No
  Max memory allocation                           6438518784 (5.996GiB)
  Unified memory for Host and Device              No
  Minimum alignment for any data type             128 bytes
  Alignment of base address                       32768 bits (4096 bytes)
  Global Memory cache type                        None
  Image support                                   No
  Local memory type                               Local
  Local memory size                               32768 (32KiB)
  Max number of constant args                     16
  Max constant buffer size                        2147483647 (2GiB)
  Max size of kernel argument                     1024
  Queue properties                                
    Out-of-order execution                        No
    Profiling                                     Yes
  Profiling timer resolution                      0ns
  Execution capabilities                          
    Run OpenCL kernels                            Yes
    Run native kernels                            No
  Device Extensions                               cl_khr_byte_addressable_store cl_khr_global_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_global_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_int64_base_atomics cl_khr_int64_extended_atomics cl_khr_fp64 cl_khr_fp16

NULL platform behavior
  clGetPlatformInfo(NULL, CL_PLATFORM_NAME, ...)  Clover
  clGetDeviceIDs(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL, ...)   Success [MESA]
  clCreateContext(NULL, ...) [default]            Success [MESA]
  clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_DEFAULT)  Success (1)
    Platform Name                                 Clover
    Device Name                                   AMD Radeon (TM) R9 390 Series (HAWAII, DRM 3.26.0, 4.18.9-1-default, LLVM 6.0.1)
  clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CPU)  No devices found in platform
  clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_GPU)  Success (1)
    Platform Name                                 Clover
    Device Name                                   AMD Radeon (TM) R9 390 Series (HAWAII, DRM 3.26.0, 4.18.9-1-default, LLVM 6.0.1)
  clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ACCELERATOR)  No devices found in platform
  clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CUSTOM)  No devices found in platform
  clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL)  Success (1)
    Platform Name                                 Clover
    Device Name                                   AMD Radeon (TM) R9 390 Series (HAWAII, DRM 3.26.0, 4.18.9-1-default, LLVM 6.0.1)

ICD loader properties
  ICD loader Name                                 OpenCL ICD Loader
  ICD loader Vendor                               OCL Icd free software
  ICD loader Version                              2.2.11
  ICD loader Profile                              OpenCL 2.1

Not that I recall for sure off the top of my head, but I think you need newer OpenCL support. In the list above it says OpenCL 1.1 but by now OpenCL 2.0 is out. I think cycles requires OpenCL 1.2 at minimum though this might have already changed. The 390 does support 2.0 though so that shouldn’t be an issue.

To get the latest drivers you might have to update your kernel. Though more likely you will have to bite the bullet and go for the amdgpu-pro driver stack.

It’s been a while since I’ve used linux though so I can only be of limited help.

One forum I can recommend you to join is https://forum.level1techs.com/ there’s alot of linux users with amd gpus over there and it tends to be a more technical crowd in there to boot so likely that someone in there can help you out.

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Thank you for explaining the issue. So it’s the drivers as I expected. Could it be that Mesa / amdgpu haven’t yet implemented support for OpenCL 2.0? I already have a very recent Kernel (4.18.9) as well as Mesa version (18.1.7) since I use a rolling release distribution. Like I said I don’t plan to put proprietary drivers into my system, which includes amdgpu-pro (Linux comes packed with the simpler amdgpu)… if this is the case I’ll have to wait until OpenCL 2.0 gets implemented by the FreeDesktop crew.

I think I remember reading that you need the OpenCL proprietary implementation for AMD. Is your graphics card not currently supported by the proprietary driver?

I don’t know: I don’t use the proprietary driver nor plan to get it. I wish to get this working with the normal builtin setup. If I cannot, I’ll have to wait until Mesa finally implements the needed support.

You can use the open source drivers alongside opencl from the proprietary driver.
Like so: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/using-amd-open-source-and-the-amdgpu-pro-opencl-driver-for-image-processing/6864

I’m using it this way on my slackware current system and blender works fine with my rx480.

Other solutions would require installing amd’s open source rocm package but as far as I know it doesn’t work with blender yet.

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Very interesting post, thanks! If I can just download and extract the proprietary OpenCL libraries separately then point Blender to them at runtime, that’s definitely an option I may consider for the time being.