Will there be more, faster innovation? Or will it become a patchwork quilt of incompatible capabilities without central control over what becomes a blessed part of ProRender releases?
Here’s what I’ve got:
One might think that with that config I might not have problems with AMD ProRender.
Installed fine (Most recent version as of this writing: 2.4.11).
Blender 2.83.6 LTS / 2.90 - Stable
Either version - crashes.
It’s easier, with less effort, using PBR assets and the PBR adjustments menu to get a good look than it has with about an hour’s worth of tinkering with AMD Radeon.
Crashed on 2.83.6. Crashed on 2.90. Not sophisticated scenes. Say, a dodecahedron. Shouldn’t be resource intensive: Crash.
Looks nice.
I’m going to uninstall it.
I was looking for a better solution to Shaders. As, the videos I watch just has people clicking a few buttons and magic happens with node connections. Little clarification as to what buttons were pushed. Ok, so, educate myself. I’m using a Mac (might’ve noticed). NodeWrangler installed, a whole new TON of keyboard shortcuts to remember. Between Sverchok, Sorcar, Animation Nodes, the Compositor, Post Rendering, I’m up to my eyeballs in keyboard shortcuts and nodes forever.
I like what can be done. Sverchok - at least has a built in ability to save, download, import and export node settings - what a novel idea /s.
Keystroke memory is reaching its limits for me.
I really Really REALLY would like to have some alternatives.
At this point I’m disappointed in ProRadeon, frustrated over using nodes / nodewrangler. I’m going to take a break for now.
Bottom line, it shouldn’t have to be overly difficult to get things done. A LOT can be done by Blender with little effort. It’s all that other effort that’s got my hide chapped at the moment.
Comparatives:
Braided Torus, Cycles, 512x256 samples, rendering time: 8 min
Braided Torus, Radeon, 64x128 samples, rendering time: 2 min (samples made no difference in quality)
Maybe it’s a problem of settings. It took maybe 15 - 20 minutes to work out the details of cycles.
After an hour and several crashes, I gave up.
Even what I was able to get, by default, was substandard by comparison.
Didn’t try it, but, I bet could probably get better quality using MatCaps than Radeon by comparison.
From the AMD Community board:
[April 2020]
"Hello,
With Blender 2.82 and RPR 2.3.4 I’ve now got a stable OSX platform to use my Radeon RX580 eGPU - this makes me very happy! Many thanks to the developers work in getting this far!
I do have a fair number of procedural materials that I used in Cycles that I am unable to use due to the missing texture texture support in RPR - Voronoi, Musgrave, [Bricke] etc.
Is there any plans to support these nodes and if not, are there any workaround that can be used to gain back these textures?"
So, even if AMD works, there are limitations, tradeoffs between what you can do with AMD Pro Render vs Blender.