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Eoin O'Neill

What's the best GPU for Linux users if I want to use hardware acceleration in blender?

@eoinoneill

Anything from AMD that your budget allows afaik.

Last time I read about it nVidia still had a noticeable performance advantage in Blender, but depending on what you want to do exactly, for me it would not be worth to deal with the bottomless abyss that nVidia drivers are for that.

I have also read that Blender is implementing new technologies that should lead to increased performance for AMD cards, but I don't know about that in detail and where that stands.

@cherti

Regarding AMD increased performance, this is actually partially what I'm worried about. Last time I bought my RX590, it was almost immediately after that OpenCL was phased out in favor of HIP and obviously my card was no longer compatible.

With the prices of GPUs as they are today, I'm a bit hesitant to pull the trigger on a card. When I borrowed my brother's RX 6650 to test, it also seemed bit underwhelming in terms of gains.

Just curious if people have experience here.

@eoinoneill ah, if that is already the depth of your testing, then I'm not much of a help really. Good luck in that endeavour! :)

@eoinoneill

That said, there is a benchmark on Blender's site, which lists GPU scores. It might help with your decision.

opendata.blender.org/

Seems ZLUDA performs better with AMD devices than HIP, though might be more unstable.

Edit: I remembered the late AMD - ZLUDA controversy, so now the project is not really in a working state at all.
phoronix.com/news/AMD-ZLUDA-CU

Blender - Open DataBlender - Open DataBlender Open Data is a platform to collect, display and query the results of hardware and software performance tests - provided by the public.

@rickyx @eoinoneill

Yes, but it won't be usable until well into 2025.

@bundyo@bundyo.com @eoinoneill@mastodon.gamedev.place

Yeah and this is something, that bugs me since years. I'm very glad that the free open source AMD Mesa driver's turned out so extraordinary well for gaming.
But for stuff like Blender it still appears that the "professional" (haha) AMD driver has to be installed, the one that makes the whole Desktop experience unstable, kernel update compatibility is not guaranteed (afaik) and Gaming is a complete mess with it. Why would anyone use this?!

So far, with the free driver, I had no luck with anything "GPU compute" wise. But I didn't want to (and so I didn't) throw more than half an hour on it. So maybe I didn't do enough.
I mean, on the Nvidia side with their proprietary drivers/firmware all this just works out of the box. Totally no hassling. But who wants Nvidia? Not me – for ideological reasons.

In theory, open cl works (not supported by Blender anymore if I'm right) with the open AMD Mesa driver's but whenever I tried something with it, it simply crashed the computer totally (couldn't even change to a TTY or ssh into the machine afterwards). Could be just me, but good luck getting the setup right.

I'm so sick of this. I'm still staying with AMD GPUs because I not often need GPU compute power, but if I do (Blender mostly) I have absurdly long waiting times because I have to rely on the CPU. You don't wanna get near me in such moments, it makes me reliable furious.

@eoinoneill nVidia cards work well (it's all I've ever used). The latest version of Ubuntu also runs Wayland on nVidia cards by default (up until now Wayland on nVidia cards was a no-no). Which to get mostly depends on how much money you want to throw at it, but the Blender Open Data page is a good indication of how each card performs opendata.blender.org

Blender - Open DataBlender - Open DataBlender Open Data is a platform to collect, display and query the results of hardware and software performance tests - provided by the public.