I recently upgraded from a Radeon HD 6870 to a Radeon R7 370 video card. Among the reasons why I did this, such as switching from the r600 driver to the radeonsi driver, was the hope that I might at long last get GPU rendering support in Cycles through OpenCL, especially since a recent release claims to have introduced better OpenCL availability for various AMD cards.
Although from what I read I should have what it takes, I still can’t get GPU compute to work. Even if I launch Blender with the CYCLES_OPENCL_TEST=all environment variable, the option does not appear in the preferences menu and I only have CPU available, despite this variable being supposed to force OpenCL availability even on video cards that shouldn’t support it altogether! I would like to know if there’s anything I can do to enable GPU rendering at this day, or when to expect a Blender release that gets it working for the R7.
Note: I am a Linux user, and I don’t use the proprietary video driver (fglrx). I stick to Mesa and the open-source driver that comes with openSUSE Linux. Please don’t ask if I’m going to install the proprietary video driver, as happens in many threads when I mention this… Mesa works perfectly for gaming and I have no reason to put proprietary and less stable software on my machine! Mesa now supports OpenCL through Clover, so this shouldn’t be an absolute limitation… if somehow it has to do with the problem, I’ll wait until Blender starts working with the free video drivers better.