Non-Nvidia GPU Card Purchase

Support Lighting and Rendering
#1

I was hoping to buy a 4gb Gigabyte Radeon R9 290 28nm 5000mhz gddr5 gpu this month, in order to whizz through my renders.

Then I read that … GPU rendering is currently only possible on Nvidia graphics cards. Support for AMD cards has been put on-hold due to driver and hardware limitations.

Is this old information?

Given that Nvidia GPUs are more expensive I am hoping The Blender team have solved the issue.

Does anyone know if I will be able to use the Radeon card or if not, the timescale involved before I can?

Thank you

#2

It’s not available and likely won’t be any time in the near future. It’s not a problem for Blender devs to solve, OpenCL works just fine on CPUs and nVidia cards, AMDs compiler just sucks and they’ve been dragging their feet on getting it fixed for years at this point. This is the same reason why other pure GPU path tracers rely on CUDA almost universally.

#3

@m9105826

I would have hoped that they would have fixed it with the 290(X) cards at least, since they are a newer architecture.