Hello, On BlenderArtists.org we managed through some dirty "hacking" (not really source code hacking, but you get the idea) to make supported AMD Radeon cards to GPU render with Cycles on Blender 2.63 at extremely good speeds.
Speaking of the probably famous BMW1M-MikePan test scene, we got actual render times of: Radeon HD7770: 0:55 Radeon HD6850: 1:40 Some issue still persist. Mainly, by using a 2.62 compiled OpenCL kernel we restricted ourselves to Cycles features implemented up to Blender version 2.62. Also for some reason it appears that the OpenCL kernel gets compiled every time a render is started, which adds significantly to the overall render time. Lastly, so far only 12.5 beta AMD Catalyst drivers for Windows appear to make the magic work. However, we're nothing more than end-users who don't really understand what's going on. Just that these preliminary results seem *very* promising and demonstrate that recent AMD video cards can be really good for rendering. It would be nice if developers gave a detailed look at this so that the real causes could be investigated and proper fixes, implemented: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?254521-A-good-news-for-AMD-ATI-Graphic-cards-owners/page4 (also see the rest of this thread for more information and background) Cheers, S.A. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
