AMD Clarifies ROCm Compute Support For GUI Applications
Towards the end of February, AMD ROCm support closed open bug reports pertaining to GUI applications like Blender and also posted this notice to the ROCm repository:
**Note:** The AMD ROCm™ open software platform is a compute stack for headless system deployments. GUI-based software applications are currently not supported.
Besides that notice, when closing bug reports were notices such as:
This understandably led to a lot of frustrated users given ROCm provides the modern OpenCL driver for Linux systems on top of the other GPU compute capabilities. The latest Radeon Software Linux drivers are also bundling part of ROCm for that OpenCL support. Yet applications like Blender, Darktable, DaVinci Resolve, and other OpenCL-using GUI applications have been having various problems and are now considered unsupported? Fortunately, there is a change of course - or rather clarifying - their intentions and not blanket-closing bugs.
AMD is now reopening all of the closed bug reports and is working to put out new messaging around their support intentions.
In one of the closed Blender bug tickets an explanation was: "What it was trying to say was more like "the ROCm stack releases do not include userspace graphics components and are not tested for graphics", which has always been the case - you need to combine ROCm userspace compute components with a graphics stack to get a full solution. We currently include a subset of the ROCm stack (up to OpenCL) in our packaged graphics drivers and will be including more over time."
Additionally, it looks like some Blender improvements at least will be on the way, "We did a lot of testing and fixing of the ROCm OpenCL stack as part of the 20.45 release, including a lot of testing/fixing on Blender. Those fixes have not yet made it into a ROCm stack release AFAIK but they should appear shortly."
The ROCmSupport user also added, "We have come up with some plans to handle GUI apps in a way."
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