I’ve been nosing around Linux recently, encouraged by reports of 30 to 50% speed gains over windows. In that process i stumbled over a claim that Windows slowness can be sidestepped by using Nvidia Tesla gpus (particularly, their TCC feature). This article also mentioned that OpenCL “is not subject to this discrepancy” (slowness compared to Linux).
While i’d love to believe that (Linux, alas, is still as unintuitively interfaced as Blender, and is incompatible with PhotoShop etc.), i just can’t. It’s also claimed that Blender is primarily cpu based, and that Linux is faster than windows only on cpu tasks, NOT gpu ones.
Surely (!) if OpenCl creamed CUDA, if AMD gpu’s nuked Nvidia gpu’s, i’d have read all about it!
Anybody up on the ins and outs of OpenCL, and can lay to rest this wild rumor?
Lastly, does anybody run Blender on Deepin Linux, as this is my second choice (a reluctant one, given the necessity of dual-booting Windows 7 with it. Are there any quirks, fatal flaws etc. with Deepin??? (aside from its forum’s registration forum being in chinese!!!)
Infinice
I got a great new camera! It’s so advanced you don’t even need it. -Steven Wright
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It is right, that Blender’s operation is mostly done on the CPU. The interface and viewport is drawn on the GPU with OpenGL. It is also true, that one can find benefits from using Linux. This is primarily due to the superior scheduling. When it comes to rendering, to date the consensus is that NVIDIA’s RTX cards are the way to go.
Would you mind stating your sources?
I haven’t heard that opencl works better for cycles than cuda on windows, but it is a fact that cuda renders slower there. It’s because of something called WDDM that the windows video card drivers use that has been on windows since windows 8:
The UI and UX on linux is a lot more flexible than what you get with windows or MacOS. The repositories (something like a free app store for all the system’s packages) for every distro will have packages for different desktop environments, so you don’t have to install another distro if you decide you don’t like the stock interface you see when you first install it. I’m personally a fan a the cinnamon desktop environment, it was a windows like feel mixed with some improvements over the stock windows UI:
There are also free alternatives to photoshop. I recommend checking out gimp and krita. I haven’t felt the need to use photoshop since version 7. Gimp has 99% of what the features you need, unless you can’t live without adjustment layers, and krita has those.
I haven’t heard of that distro before. It could be good, I don’t know. Personally I like to stick with debian based distros. There is usually a lot of documentation on how to do things there (possibly because a lot of other distros like ubuntu are based on it). I would try either Linux mint or debian.
In fact Deepin is based on Debian stable. While it was initially geared toward the far Asian market it quickly gained popularity in the rest of the world for it’s interface. Personally I use something else.