Radeon Pro Render

Hey, i’m not sure how long this has been out, but AMD is about to take over Rendering on various platforms but i found it looking for Blender plug in.
https://radeon-pro.github.io/RadeonProRenderDocs/en/plugins/blender/switching.html

This is huge for 3d modelers! it allows for combining GPU and CPU cores to render!!!
using whole machine towards a usually lengthy process. It also is usable with nvidia cards too. This deserves an eppisode on the Level1 channel… please. There are a number of other pro tools and plugins along with this one! even an SDK. compatible with LInux ,win, and mac.

Doesn’t CUDA already allow that? I’m a bit confused as to what this does that’s new. Definitely excited if it’s faster/better in some other way, but I threw it in some old projects and it looks like it’s doing strange things to lights. It seems to take fewer samples (though it calls them “iterations?”) to get to the same lack of grain as cycles. Any articles on what it’s actually doing? I can’t really find too much.

I just stumbled on it but it seems AMD is pushing out these pro tool plugins for many softwares, (Blender, Maya, 3ds,creo…) Not sure about all the ins and outs as of yet, but it comes with a SDK to develop on these tools. The raytracing , shaders , machine learning, and such are all involved some how. even comes with a material library. Just getting it now to play with. I’m sure there will be some getting use to time involved. just like some things work different from cycles to evee

Actually here’s what I’ve gathered from the site (I’m only including spots where I think it differs from Cycles or just normal ray tracing):

  • Has some AI denoising (which might be great, or just as irritating as OptiX)
  • Vulkan integration/support/something - hooray open source? I think?
  • Bunch of blender optimizations, which is nice for me I guess
  • Tile rendering: okay this is actually cool, renders more pixels than fit in GPU memory by dividing the image (I think? AMD’s site isn’t super clear)
  • Looks like it has its own texturing nodes, but it can be baked from Blender’s normal
  • RPR Layer node - layer textures somehow? I’d like a bit more clarification on what this does, but I guess I can RTFM
  • Extra nodes have more controls, which might be helpful?
  • Physical light shader which does some extra stuff that I don’t know enough about to judge
  • VR Camera exists

The things that stand out to me are:

  • The performance and memory improvements. If this is faster than RTX, AMD GPUs might be good!
  • The resolution flexibility. Tiled rendering looks really useful.

Some weird stuff:

  • The product page says it only supports 16.04 and 18.04, proboably just a validation, it seems to work fine on the weird-independent distro I use.
  • Looks like they’re really leaning on blender, I hope that’s an open source thing.

Also not new, looks like it was released last month. RPR 2 looks to be coming soon? Maybe? Overall, it’s definitely interesting and might make AMD GPUs good. Or it might be nowhere near as fast as RTX/OptiX, in which case it’ll Probably Be Good Next Year™.

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well, going to trusty ol youtube, i found some tutorials. Seems it streamlines things in weird ways, getting rid of nodes through UBR shader… and the way lights are handled. still researching now.

Are you running the forked branch of blender UPBGE??? (game engine)

I think he cares that finally AMD gets some love lol. Its been a hard ride for AMD getting official support in stuff thats decent enough to compete with Nvidia

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I tried prorender but It wanted me to use some kinda special resources or something, maybe I just didn’t know what I was doing and there were little to no tutorials on youtube how to use it, but if you can use regular materials then that would be great

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So far it seems it comes with a material library of its own that is shared across platforms and programs, so for instance it makes transitioning a scene from blender to say Unreal engine much smoother, as the plug in also is applicable to Unreal. It does use outside textures and you can convert node textures into “baked” textures. As with everything blender, its all about how you setup all the toggles and switches. What i think they have done is try to make a universal render-er that can be adapted with a little toggling to almost any 3d software. The little i have played with it so far has show a massive speed advantage over cycles, but that wasn’t surprise. It depends on what is being rendered but it is slower in some jobs to evee but faster in other jobs. As Im running an all AMD system been able to throw all my CPU cores and Radeon VII at the work simultaneously has improved the previewer as well as render times overall.

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I think Cycles already can render on GPU and CPU at the same time. I never do it, though, because my RTX2080Ti is so fast at it and my i7-5820K isn’t. :\

you can’t mix nvidia and AMD in cycles though

GPUs? I guess I don’t even want to though.

I think it is just another tool in the development box, i like the fact it is applicable to so many other software in my work pathway. and i am running an all AMD build… it is optimized for AMD hardware(of course). I’m installing it on Creo too for my CAD work. I know other engineers doing work with Simtesting in Unreal engine. So this may improve my workflow in many areas. understanding the quirks of a renderer takes time and development. I know the MAC version has the most issues. I’m gonna try out the Linux version to see the differences.

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