I recently had my aging GTX1060 die on me, and need a new GPU. While CUDA itself works well, the proprietary drivers and issues with Wayland are annoying, so I’m looking for possible alternatives to Nvidia.
It seems that Intel Arc explicitly supports this kind of workloads through their Compute Platform, while there is no official support for most AMD cards through rocm and it’s unclear to me whether non-RX7900 cards work at all according to AMD’s ROCM documentation.
Does anyone have experience with either setup? I don’t really need better performance than my old GTX1060, so don’t think it makes sense to spend much more than 250$/€.
I could check with my Radeon RX 6600 in Linux (I have setup Manjaro but I can run any distro you like). Please note that I have a vfio setup.
What kind of test should I run?
Thank you for your offer. I found a way on the Blender Benchmark site to separate by OS, and it seems the RX6600 works on Linux and performs at least twice as well as my old gpu, so I’m quite sure that that at least the renderer works. However, it seems that there are some unresolved issues with the 3D viewport which might completely freeze your system if you try it out: Blender Cycles+HIP - using rendered viewport crashes system/GPU on Linux with RX 6900 XT GPU (#2145) · Issues · drm / amd · GitLab
If you want to run a test either way, and the RX6600 is your host card, according to the Arch wiki, you should just be able to install the packages “blender” and “hip-runtime-amd”. I assume they are the same in Manjaro. After that, go to Blender’s Preferences->System and select HIP under Cycles Render Devices. If that works, you can get the Blender benchmark launcher from https://opendata.blender.org/ with which you can download and run the benchmark workloads.
What display server are you using? Currently I am on Xorg because I remote onto the desktop with Anydesk and get an segmentation fault upon start of Blender. Anyway I’ll try with wayland when I am back home.
Edit: Manjaro is one of my guest systems with GPU passthrough. I run Proxmox (Debian) as hypervisor.
Ah I see. I think it should work either way. I’ve been running Xorg too until now because it was the only option with Nvidia. Don’t think it should make a difference with regards to Blender.
I have rocm-core installed and Blender 3.6 doesn’t recognize my 7900XT. I don’t pay much attention to it (just installed because). There might be a way to get it running…
Yeah, 7900xt is definitely one of the cards that should work. As far as I understand it, ROCM is the underlaying system and Blender support is written for the HIP API which is on top of that, so you need that runtime present to be able to use the card.
Browsing the results on https://opendata.blender.org/, it seems that both the A580 and A750 handily beat the RX6600 in Cycles render performance, the lesser gaming performance or the high idle power draw of the Arc cards doesn’t really matter to me since electricity is cheap here. Given that there might be bugs like the aforementioned AMD HIP viewport one on Intel Arc too I might just buy either of those cards and potentially return it if there are significant issues that aren’t actively getting fixed.
Got Blender 4.1 from AUR package installed and running and also installed hip-runtime-amd. Unfortunately Blender doesn’t recognized my GPU. Do I have to use the proprietary AMD pro driver or are there other requirements?
Edit: Still have Kernel 6.1 installed, I’ll try the latest.
Edit 2: Okay, updated the kernel, but selecting HIP in preferences hardlocks the system/VM
The proprietary driver shouldn’t be necessary. I’m pretty sure you are running into that bug I linked or something related. Doesn’t seem that there is a fix for now. Thanks for your help regardless.
I think I’m going to get a Intel Arc card since as far as I can tell there shouldn’t be any major issues issues with Blender.
I’ve got a RX 7600, and I’m running Arch. Up until about two weeks ago HIP worked pretty well with Cycles to render images in blender, and OpenCL worked with darktable (but you had to edit darktablerc to ensure the right OpenCL version got used.)
But something broke the compute functionality within the last two weeks, and I’m not sure exactly what it was. Blender was segfaulting, but that’s been fixed, but both HIP and OpenCL remain broke. It could have been the last ROCm updates. I’m waiting for mesa 23.3, and then I’ll start testing to see if I can roll back the right stuff and get it working again.
