Halp Plox

Communities Visual Arts & Design
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Edit/Update: new Problem which was part of my old problem. Blender won't recognize my APU. It only shows CPU under rendering devices, hence my initial thought that the integrated gpu was below useless for Blender. No matter what i try from other forums, every console command work-around/hack thing doesn't let Blender see my gpu. an image for confirmation.

Le image

no gpu.png1280x720 416 KB

I've tried multiple library downloads for Opencl that are recommended when googling, non of which did anything. I even tried installing a different renderer as you can see from the above screen shot.

I've updated, deleted, and downloaded blender multiple times. I know my gpu portion is working because Heroes of the Storm, Rogue Legacy, Freedom Planet and steam work flawlessly.

Here's a readout for my gpu


lspci -k | grep -A 2 -i "VGA"
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
Kaveri [Radeon R7 Graphics] (rev d4)
Subsystem: ASRock Incorporation Kaveri [Radeon R7 Graphics]
Kernel driver in use: radeon

On the topic of compatibility Blender says only GCN 2.0 and newer which, as far as I'm aware, encompasses Kaveri/Godavari. There are even Blog posts of people with their A8's and A10's showing things working perfectly. So what am i missing? Because the money i thought I'd have to get a new graphics card seems to be getting sucked up by life's curveballs.

Original post below

I searched for Blender, 3d modeling and related terms here but found nothing useful.

I'm learning/teaching myself 3d modeling and if u didn't guess from my use of blender, I essentially have no budget. I want to know, as a newbie, what graphics card I should get to keep my 7670k from having a heart attack when i start putting more and more poly's on screen.

I'm trying to save up $150 and may be able to get 180 but that's nearing kidney selling territory.

Right now my rig is as follows -
edited in: Linux Ubuntu 17.04 and Mint 18
APU: AMD 7670k
Ram: 2x4GB 2400MHz ram
PSU: 750w corsair (it was 40 bucks when i needed a psu so that's why it's so overkill)
MOBO: Asroc 88x PRO+3
Cooler: Cryorig M9

I'm going to see what OC'ing will give me, over current abilities, but I think I'd benefit more from dropping in a proper GPU

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Considering that you are just starting with blender your scenes are probably not too complex, so I'm surprised you are running into problems in the first place. I am currently stuck on Ivy-Bridge era Intel graphics and don't have any problems.

Are you sure you aren't just overdoing it with polygons? Polys increase both render time and RAM usage as as well, so keep them to a minimum.

That aside, I recommend getting an Nvidia GPU for use with cycles, as OpenCL (and thus AMD) support is still being worked on. Your budget places you right into 1050 Ti territory.

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I'm not having problems yet but when i start building high poly models, even though i know i can turn down the polycount while working, i don't want to run into a wall of 5 minute lag every time i want to change my viewing angle or see how the final render will look. Cuz my thing is, when my work flow is interrupted it drives me nuts so i just want to avoid running into that down the line, be it 3 or 7 months from now.

but yeah, was thinking the 1050ti would be a good choice. conversely, would looking for older used cards be a bad idea?

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But that's exactly what I'm talking about - that shouldn't happen. How many polys are you dealing with?

Nothing wrong with old cards, but two things to keep in mind:

  • Pascal was quite the performance bump over older generations
  • Make sure your card has enough VRAM. Cycles will refuse to render scenes when it runs out of memory.
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For comparison: I have no problems when working with 1,000,000 tris. The viewport is not exactly buttery smooth, but nothing problematic either.

And that's with Intel HD4000

1 Like
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my comment about 5 minutes of lag was just a hypothetical. I just want to avoid that situation ever happening. But as you've said in your other response below it seems like either grabbing a 1050ti or a good priced R290x should be good. Much thanks for your insight :3