Can Blender 2.79 still run on RTX 4070 - 4090 still today?

Support Technical Support
1

Hello,

I finally got my RTX 4080 - in my PC is still my old GTX 1070.

My question: Will Blender 2.79 still be usable after switching cards?

Of course I will use Blender 4.1 for the most time BUT I am working on a very experimental 2 hour Movie since 10 years, that I intend to render in final 4K resolution with the RTX 4080.

BUT around 20% of the Scenes are created in Blender Internal because of I really love the optic (compare Yves netzhammer for example).

So it would be important to me, to being able to still start and use Blender 2.79 after switching cards.

I would love to still use Cycles AND Internal in Blender 2.79. I understand it will be much slower as in Blender 4.1 and this is not important. Most scenes in the old Blender render fast enough on my old GTX 1070 anyway or on my new CPU.

My only concern is: Can I still use Blender 2.79 with the RTX 4080? Will Cycles still work? Speed is not that important, I don’t need some fancy support.

Maybe someone with a RTX 4070/80/90 already installed can verify, that Blender 2.79 still starts up and is usable under windows 11 64bit, that would be great!

Thanks a lot for the support.

Otherwise I would have to make sure to render all scenes before switching cards… or put the old card in my Dads PC and render it there in case…

OH or most probably Cycles in Blender 2.79 will run on my CPU in any case? Of course RTX 4080 would probably be huge speed gain if blender 2.79 can somehow use it in cycles, but the CPU workaournd would be good enough in emergency. Only to clarify why I would be as crazy to use Blender 2.79 with cycles still today: I have some scenes in the old layer system and converting it together with all the compositing is time consuming…

Will Blender 2.79 start up at all with a RTX 4080 installed?

2

Why not just try it ??
(I’m having a 2.49b version installed on my linux…)

(You know that you can just extract the zip and run it… ?? No install needed… !!)

3 Likes
3

Is there a reason why not? :slightly_smiling_face:
It’s just that the new technology (the higher version of the blender function) is not available.

1 Like
4

Okay Blender 2.79 still starts. It can render internal and Cycles on CPU.

But Blender 2.79 can’t render Cycles on the GPU at all with my RTX 4080 as it seams. Maybe there is a special build? Will research a bit…

Okay does not work the the latest b Release. But I can live rendering the old Scenes still needed on the CPU. Although it as around 2times slower on the CPU as with the old GTX 1070.

Sadly the RTX 4080 is 4 slots and I can’t place my GTX 1070 with it… LOL

Probably GPU Rendering in Blender 2.79 with RTX 4080 is impossible. It tells my no kernels for this card.

5

There is a setting for selecting a GPU in your environment settings.
When this is enabled, GPU rendering is enabled.

add …

There seems to be a kernel problem. Please refer to the link :sweat_smile:

6

This is the last 2.7x release: Index of /release/Blender2.79/latest/

It -should- have some stuff added after the b release, but ymmv. :wink:

7

Okay this latest unzipped and started does not display File, Edit and many other areas are empty seams not to work under my OS win 11, but thanks worth a try

8

Of course I switched on CUDA in user Preferences, what do you mean by environment settings?

I can select GPU render, but it runs in an error in Blender 2.79b no kernel found for this card

9

sorry…
When the support for blender 2.79 ended, the RTX graphics card did not exist, so it was not improved. :sweat_smile:

There is a solution to that in the link I attached, but I don’t know if it’s working on it.

Since I’m using GTX, there’s no way I can confirm it for you. I’ll share it with you if I have any additional information.

10

Okay I stay with rendering needed old scenes with CPU, building a blender version will take too much time, will not justify the time savings in rendering.

Unless anyone discovers a prebuild Blender 2.79 to work with RTX cards.

Sadly the linux version link is gone.

11

blender_279b_gpu_kernels.7z (1.5 MB)

Try these, place the .cubin files next to the already existing ones in 2.79\scripts\addons\cycles\lib\

this should add support for turing (20xx/16xx) ampere (30xx) and lovelace (40xx) cards.

  1. No support what so ever, if they work, great, if not, nothing i can do about it
  2. Only tested on a gtx1660 rendering the default cube
  3. Only cuda support, 2.79 never had optix support, so those RTX cores are gonna sit idle, still better than nothing.
5 Likes
12

WOW great, thanks!!! Did the trick. I really love the blender community. That simple. I wonder why these files never got placed in the offical last release if the fix ist that simple to do.
Of course creating the files is probably much harder.

Better than nothing is good - still 2-3 times faster as CPU and the scene has some BVH build time. Helps a lot to speed things up.

EDIT: And the RTX cores do not stay idle, as I render some Blender 4.1 scenes simultanious and it impacts the render time in Blender 4.1 very little…

1 Like
13

The above attached index of /release/Blender2.79/latest/link’s blender 2.79c has GPU+CPU acceleration.

However, this version is a mix of blender 2.79 and blender 2.8, which may cause problems because it is not an official version.

14

It’s …complicated, even the optix path in 4.1 still uses the normal cuda cores for a lot of the work plus the memory bandwidth can (depending on your scenes) be limiting you as well, so starting a second render will generally eat away at performance regardless if it’s a optix or cuda render.