[HN Gopher] Blender 3.6 LTS Released
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Blender 3.6 LTS Released
Author : victornomad
Score : 222 points
Date : 2023-06-27 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.blender.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.blender.org)
| codetrotter wrote:
| Does anyone know to what extent Blender is currently making use
| of hw acceleration on macOS?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I've got 3.1 (early 2022) installed locally and there's a Metal
| GPU+CPU backend for Cycles.
| lattalayta wrote:
| Apple joined the Blender development fund and contributed a
| metal backend to the offline Cycles renderer in Blender 3.1
| https://code.blender.org/2021/11/cycles-x-project-update/
| https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-developmen...
|
| And in Blender 3.5 a Metal background was added to the viewport
| https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-met...
| paczki wrote:
| Lot of great quality of life stuff in this update, but especially
| being able to edit text objects by just.. clicking on it.
| Changing styles is nice too.
|
| I don't often do anything with text within Blender for this
| specific reason, if your text was anything more than really a
| word or two it was nothing but friction.
|
| Excited to be able to use it in a much easier manner. Blender
| remains one of my favorite pieces of software out there.
| [deleted]
| doodlesdev wrote:
| > Support for hardware ray-tracing acceleration has been added
| for AMD and Intel graphics cards. Added experimental
| support for AMD hardware ray-tracing acceleration, using HIP RT.
| This improves performance on RX 6000, RX 7000, W6000, and W7000
| series GPUs. Known limitations:
| Windows only, as HIP RT doesn't support Linux yet.
| Degenerate triangles may causes crashes or poor performance.
| Shadows in hair are not rendering accurately. >
| Windows only, as HIP RT doesn't support Linux yet
|
| NOOOOOO. I guess I'll have to stay with Blender 2.80 for now.
| Honestly, the situation with hardware acceleration on Linux is
| pretty sad. I'm a full-time Linux user, and I acquired an AMD GPU
| specifically because of better Linux support and much better
| open-source drivers.
|
| Blender 3 taking so much time to give AMD Linux users hardware
| acceleration back makes me sad. I guess it's not misguided
| though, they got a lot of attention from the industry in recent
| years, and that's where funding comes from, so naturally they
| will focus on supporting the major use cases (i.e. Windows and
| Nvidia) and improving features. Though I do love the new and
| improved features, UV packing, for instance, was a longtime pet
| peeve of mine while using Blender compared to other (closed-
| source) modeling packages.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| HIP works in Linux! You can use your GPU to render with cycles,
| you just can't use _this specific feature_ of your GPU (yet).
|
| There's no reason to stick with Blender 2.8.
| Kye wrote:
| The speed difference with ray tracing is substantial based on
| demos I've seen. At least with RTX.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I'm definitely excited to try it out, but it's not like we
| were completely missing GPU rendering without it.
| Kye wrote:
| No, but I do think it's reasonable for them to express
| frustration over missing out on a ~2x or better render
| speed improvement. It's like having a whole extra GPU
| installed but unusable.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Yes, but that's not my point. You don't have to keep
| using 2.8 to get GPU rendering in Linux.
| [deleted]
| doodlesdev wrote:
| Only if you use the AMDGPU-Pro drivers since it requires
| HIP. I should've made that clearer in my original
| comment. If there's a way to get HIP working under the
| Mesa drivers, I haven't been able to find it in my
| cursory searches through the internet.
|
| The newer versions of Blender only support CUDA and HIP
| as render devices, whereas in Blender 2.8 we still had
| the option to use OpenCL for rendering. You could say the
| blame is on AMD for giving subpar HIP support on Linux,
| and that would be fair IF the OpenCL backend didn't exist
| in Blender 2.8.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >because of better Linux support
|
| In my experience nvidia has better Linux support. Just look at
| how many projects are using Linux and cuda and don't support
| AMD.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems like Nvidia's stuff is a bit more difficult to work
| with for the community, but the community puts a ton more
| effort into it.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The GPGPU community is full of a decade+ of bright-eyed
| bushy-tailed AMD fans who were painfully and traumatically
| pushed into the NVidia camp after believing AMD's promises
| that it was totally ready for GPGPU (if only people would
| write OpenCL!) but then discovering the horrible truth that
| this was very much not the case. AMD's OpenCL was dire. I
| wasted months into that flaming piece of trash -- twice! --
| and really wish I hadn't. Both times I had to toss my code,
| sell my card, eat the spread, eat the ebay tax, and pay the
| green tax to buy a lower-specced nvidia card, but that all
| sucked a lot less than tossing my very own programmer
| months into a dumpster fire. Ironically, the very openness
| that was supposed to win converts from the green camp
| actually sent people in the opposite direction because you
| could run your OpenCL on an nvidia card and find out that
| actually the problem wasn't with your code but rather with
| AMD's drivers.
|
| Hopefully now that AMD has money they can afford the
| headcount to fix their bugs and some more headcount to make
| up for 15 years of lost time in the applications that
| matter. Hopefully. But I trusted them twice and got burned,
| so this time I need to see proof before I jump. I need to
| see blender renders, I need to see torch trainings, I need
| to see NAMD (or insert science code here) running on a
| compatibility layer. It is unfortunate that the actual
| compatibility situation seems to have hardly moved at all
| in 10 years (it was right around the corner in 2013 too,
| you see) but the fundamentals _are_ different now so I hold
| out hope.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Lemme guess. You tried OpenCL 2.0 and found out it was a
| dumpster fire on AMD?
|
| OpenCL1.2 worked fine for all the test code I made for
| myself. But OpenCL 2.0 was... horrid. Unworkable.
|
| --------
|
| My next step personally is to give DirectX 12 computer
| shaders a serious try. A lot of people are also talking
| about Vulkan shaders, as apparently that works well on
| Linux too.
|
| ROCm on Linux is fine enough. But this weirdness of
| having a feature on ROCm Windows (when ROCm Windows isn't
| even public yet?) is well... weird. I guess its cool that
| AMD has worked with the Windows team to get everything
| squared up, but it'd be nice if ROCm on Windows were
| available to the masses.
| thewataccount wrote:
| > Just look at how many projects are using Linux and cuda and
| don't support AMD.
|
| That's because of the CUDA api specifically.
|
| For the display support it's very hit/miss. Somethings work
| fine, then you want to try Wayland and things get odd...
|
| When working correctly they Nvidia is mostly fine - Xorg
| games have support for everything except dlss3 AFAIK.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| Depends on what you're doing, which GPU you go for, etc. For
| my use cases switching from NVIDIA to AMD was a great
| decision. Also, if you're going to stick with open source
| drivers there is basically no comparison.
|
| Just for reference, what setup are you using? (Linux kernel,
| drivers, GPU, etc.)
| iFire wrote:
| For example, on my AMD Linux test case, dual monitors and one
| with VR would be unstable.
|
| Nvidia handled it ok.
| jchw wrote:
| NVIDIA cards have better Linux support roughly up until you
| connect a display output to the machine.
|
| AMD's issues are more general and not really a particular
| problem with their Linux support: they're spotty in general
| (bad drivers on card release, spotty OS support a la no ROCm
| on Windows.) In practice it obviously matters if you still
| can't get the features you need, but in my experience trying
| to run a modern Linux desktop setup with NVIDIA cards is
| absolutely second-class at this point. I tried my hand at it
| with a 2060 and the card was out of the machine in a month so
| I could have a stable desktop that actually resumed from
| sleep properly again.
|
| Granted, issues like that are very much case-by-case. Still;
| I can't even run SwayWM with NVIDIA as I do with AMD and
| Intel; even with patches to "fix" the flickering issues,
| XWayland stuff is broken. This makes no sense of course. It
| shouldn't need to be a snowflake case.
| nsajko wrote:
| > I can't even run SwayWM with NVIDIA as I do with AMD and
| Intel
|
| How do you know this is an NVIDIA issue, as opposed to a
| Wayland or wlroots issue?
| bombela wrote:
| Same experience here. I get 4k 120hz over HDMI with my
| puny AMD laptop embedded GPU without tearing on Wayland.
|
| Previous machine with Nvidia GPU (on Xorg) couldn't
| resume and had atrocious performances because of
| overheating.
| jchw wrote:
| Wayland does not contain any NVIDIA defeat devices, and
| neither does SwayWM. They just use standard Linux GPU
| interfaces. What I do know is that you can't use the same
| codepaths you'd use with countless other GPUs, again
| including AMD and Intel: NVIDIA cards need special cases.
| This is just as true for KDE and GNOME, which also do not
| work as well with NVIDIA under Wayland, despite having
| special codepaths for NVIDIA cards specifically.
|
| This issue isn't new either. In fact, until very
| recently, it was significantly worse. But progress on
| NVIDIA's end has been slow, it seemingly gets completely
| stalled for years at a time.
|
| On the other hand, Nouveau works quite well with Wayland
| compositors if your card is well-supported, AND you never
| have to wait on a kernel upgrade because NVIDIA's shim
| hasn't been updated yet.
|
| There's basically exactly one driver that works this way.
| It's not a hardware problem, it's not a general GPU
| issue. There's just one thing it could be.
| kaetemi wrote:
| So safest to put both an AMD card in for display, and an
| Nvidia card for compute?
| jchw wrote:
| Actually, this might not really be that bad of an idea.
| Certainly for headless CUDA, it has a lot of potential to
| be useful.
|
| That said, in practice I expect this to suck. There's
| probably a lot of stuff in the Linux desktop stack that
| does not deal with heterogeneous graphics cards well
| right now.
| [deleted]
| colechristensen wrote:
| AMD has much better open source drivers. nvidia gives you a
| binary blob... but it works better.
| wswope wrote:
| That's out of date, I believe. Nvidia went open source last
| year, though they did that by moving a lot of code from the
| drivers over to their firmware (in binary blob form).
|
| https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-
| sourc...
| opencl wrote:
| Those open source kernel modules are not usable in any
| practical sense for consumer hardware in their current
| state.
|
| From the repo readme[1], "GeForce and Workstation support
| is still considered alpha-quality."
|
| [1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Another limitation was in the GPUs supported - only the
| latest generation is supported, so no support for common
| consumer level cards - (1050, 1080 etc).
| circuit10 wrote:
| That's only for the kernel part, not the userspace part
| artemisart wrote:
| > Blender 3 taking so much time to give AMD Linux users
| hardware acceleration back makes me sad.
|
| I believe the issue comes from AMD which disable/doesn't
| support their GPGPU libraries on Linux and Blender cannot do
| much about it. GPGPU support in general is much much better on
| NVIDIA thanks to CUDA, both for Windows and Linux.
| vanous wrote:
| I am with you, went for AMD too and I am having the same
| issues. I don't need 3D often, but occasionally I would like
| to/need to do something in Blender and though luck. I even
| tried rebooting to Windows, which I do like once in a few
| years, still no dice.
|
| Blender is super good and I love it and support it via plugin
| contributing. I keep my fingers crossed :)
| SmoothBrain12 wrote:
| [dead]
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I love Blender so much. A true success story for Open Software.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the top 10 of FOSS history
| fidotron wrote:
| Honestly I think a lot of it comes down to Ton being the right
| personality for leadership in that community. I know of various
| tech and art people that bounced off Blender over the years
| because of justified problems with it at different times, but
| Ton didn't let that become a terminal problem and steadily
| iterated the whole thing to get it to where it is today. It's
| great to see this being far more widely appreciated than even
| ten years ago.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Ironically started as a proprietary software. The community had
| to buy back the rights for the source code to open source it.
| countrymile wrote:
| The funding model is fantastic. They probably have more
| developers than the commercial competition. They've been
| helping Krita in setting up a similar ecosystem
| somsak2 wrote:
| where can I learn about the funding model?
| another_fool wrote:
| The Blender Fund's website[0] gives some good background,
| and has a list of members and corporate sponsors.
|
| [0] https://fund.blender.org/
| troymc wrote:
| Yes, and this page [1] has a nice big-picture graphic
| showing where money comes from and where it goes.
|
| Not directly mentioned there is the income they get from
| selling merch in their store [2]. I guess it's small
| compared to their other sources of income.
|
| [1] https://www.blender.org/about/
|
| [2] https://store.blender.org/
| kaveh808 wrote:
| Are there any plans for a C/C++ API for Blender?
| KittyCatCuddler wrote:
| Not currently.
| q_andrew wrote:
| Impressive numbers.
|
| -Up to 60x Faster copying mesh attributes
|
| -10x Faster loading curve objects
|
| -9x Faster loading point clouds
|
| -4-6x Faster loading large meshes
| smcnally wrote:
| "List mode items can now be dragged by the name" not just the
| icon -- very helpful
|
| https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/c3dfe1e2...
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