…as I wrote already, I was mostly talking about 7900 XTX in comparison to 4090. On top of that 4070 has half the VRAM, which to people like me is especially limiting. The scenes I’m working with would break 4070’s VRAM in half.
So, again, to me at least, 7900 XTX seems like an interesting deal, if one doesn’t want to feed nvidia. If you’re on a budget and don’t have personal preferences, 4070 is most likely the best option for you right now.
I was considering 3090 before XTX, but new were around 140% of XTX’s price new and I also saw in these tests above that the performance is pretty much equal. So I didn’t feel like wasting money and went with AMD instead.
There are 2 new releases of HIP-RT ray tracing SDK available (2.0 ad 2.1). If I read the release notes correctly the newest one should fix motion blur handling in Blender.
There are also some performance improvements. So far Blender is using version 1.0.
No HIP-RT for Blender 4.1 on Linux, perhaps AMD changed their mind? Not super important as HIP-RT doesn’t appear to be very performant.
Sep 23 - HIP-RT for Linux is waiting on the release of ROCm 5.7, unclear if this will be in time for 4.0. Jan 24 - HIP-RT support on Linux is not going to be ready for 4.1. It is waiting for the HIP-RT library to be open sourced.
I would far prefer AMD resolve the view-port issue, at its current rate it might not be fixed before RDNA1/2/3 is end of life.
Jan 23 - Linux RDNA2 crash bug was confirmed by AMD team and is being investigated. May 23 - This driver release should also fix viewport crashes with RDNA2 graphics card. It may take a bit for Linux distributions to upgrade to this version. Jan 24 - A fix for the issue with multiple viewports and overlays is being worked on, this will be a fix in the Linux driver.
Being open source let’s other developers see what is going on with the code and how better to use it in projects. An SDK can only get you so far, but knowing how the driver works at the machine level means you know what you’re coding for and how best to optimize it.
It also means there is a chance commits could be made to backport HIP RT to other cards via the software route or via Stream Processor assist or even fork the project.
It’s a good showing for AMD. It’s saying: here’s how we do it, here how you can do things with our code, here’s how your project can benefit, and if you see something we missed, fork it, add it, and submit a pull request.
This CUDA accelerated terrain addon is probably my all time favourite.
Was able to squeeze out 16k images with my 7900 xtx! Took around 22Gb and 6 hours. I think 8k took around 15-20 minutes and I forgot how much VRAM. Didn’t have time to experiment with it too much yet, unfortunately, but wanted to see, if it works. And oh my, it does!
Those test were on 4.1 and with initial ZLUDA version released this February. Haven’t tried updated version yet. I read in the article above there were some commits dedicated to 4.x.
There’s one bug I found and addon creator suggested it might be AMD related. When opening previously saved files with this addon, you need to do it from already opened Blender, do not open the file from within File explorer. It will crash, if you will try to run it.
