Blender 2.75 Allows For AMD OpenCL Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 27 May 2015 at 09:05 AM EDT. 15 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
A test build of Blender 2.75 was released this past week and it will be of interest to a lot of open-source designers and artists.

Blender 2.75 notably has added initial support for OpenCL on AMD Radeon GPUs with the Cycles Rendering. The AMD OpenCL support is coming as the Cycles compute kernels have finally been split into smaller kernels, so they now compile and work for AMD GPUs. However, the AMD OpenCL stack failing to work with transparent shadows due to a compiler bug. The AMD OpenCL improvements for Blender was work led by AMD that we previously covered on Phoronix.

Blender 2.75 Cycles also has support for Light Portals and contains several performance and memory optimizations. Other Blender 2.75 work includes real-time visualization of the stereoscopic effect, rendering of multiple views, compositor and sequencer improvements, and numerous other additions. There's also a new OpenGL Preview option for Blender to save your work as an OpenGL preview of the animation.

More details on the current Blender 2.75 work in development can be found via the tentative release notes. Those wishing to try out the current test build of Blender 2.75 can find it at download.blender.org.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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