– EDIT 2012-02-17 –
There is a 2.62 compilation of Blender on Graphicall (with all CUDA kernels) that is somewhat functional (32-bit Windows) :
Set up “User Preferences” -> “System” -> CUDA & ION, change the rendering engine to “Cycles Render” and set the Render devices to “GPU Compute” and “Experimental”. OpenCL didn’t work (rendered blackscreen).
Caveat - This compile seems to work well enough with a pretty basic .blend, but crashed when I tried to run it against the cycles benchmark.
The console error messages were trying to make some unsupported call, then the GPU stopped responding, restarted, and the render stopped.
The basic render (that worked) took 7:56.10 on the ION GPU, the netbook’s Atom D525 CPU took 21:46.5. Same render on a Corei7-920 takes 2:55.36.
Obviously, the hardware hasn’t really been put together for something using as intense as Blender, but it would probably suffice if you just wanted to do a little modelling/sculpting on the go, maybe get a feel for things with a simple material. I wouldn’t purchase one with the intention of using Blender in any meaningful way.
ORIGINAL POST:
Spent a few hours today attempting to get Blender 2.62 running on my Asus EeePC 1215N netbook, thought I’d save anyone else looking to do the same, a bit of time.
Hardware : Eee PC 1215N, Atom D525, 2G RAM, nVidia ION (gen 2) w/Optimus + Intel GMA3150 video chipsets (high/low power), 2G RAM, 250G SATA hdd, Windows 7 32-bit.
GPUz identifies the ION silicon as a GT218, uses 512M of shared RAM, 16 CUDA cores @ 475MHz. It has Shader Model 4.1 and Compute Capability 1.2. The CC is where the ION chipset comes up short for Blender, as Blender needs 1.3 (or better).
I did download a version of Blender 2.61.3 from Graphicall compiled with all the CUDA kernels (1.0, 1.2, 1.2…present) but it also didn’t render using the GPU; the console yielded the error “1.3 needed, found 1.2”. OpenCL is not yet supported, as of this writing.
Cycles still runs on the CPU, but as near as I can tell, the ION chipset is just a tad too old to be used in current iterations of Blender, does not render the scene.
HTH.