I guarantee you it didn’t. Try setting up OpenCL and rendering just maybe 30 seconds of a simple glitch animation in FHD in Cycles and let me know how long it takes. Probably like 30 minutes.
I shouldn’t wonder if those issues are related to the combination of most recent hardware and outdated and broken (“patched”) software that comes with non-rolling-release distributions. I’m especially finger pointing (K)Ubuntu here, for which I can tell stories about long-term software problems. Those problems were gone as soon as I switched to Manjaro.
And I’m not a fanboy of AMD either. A long time ago I owned an ATI card, but found it no as stable. The next two graphics cards were from NVidia, currently a GTX 750 TI. It is really stable and works well with OpenCL using proprietary drivers, and cost only 150€ at that time. But this card is quite old now, so I’m looking for a replacement.
Recent articles from 2020 at phoronix.com claim that the situation regarding the newest AMD cards (“Big Navi”, RX 6800 Series) under Linux Kernel 5.9 and above is changing towards surprisingly superior FOSS drivers, at least when comparing performance against the older generations from AMD. These FOSS drivers also seem to be very competitive against NVidia under Linux. Although the articles only benchmark performance and power consumption, I have the feeling that this great performance indicates that the drivers are also stable enough.
I wonder if it’s time in 2021 to say “Good bye NVidia, hello AMD” ??? Unfortunately the actual prices for RX 6800 cards are much to high, so I would definitively wait for prices to come down to less than 550€. I don’t play games and solely use it for OpenCL with darktable (and vkdt in some day). I know that a graphics card for 200-350€ would do the job either, but I would spent the extra money if I get a really fast and stable card with FOSS drivers that works for the next 10 years.
@rkowalke, sadly it seems that the OpenCL implementation on AMD cards is not at all stable. I had issues on both Kubuntu, and Manjaro KDE on my RX580.
It would also appear that AMD is also with drawing support for some Radeon cards with the ROCm 4.0 release. So sometimes having the latest and greatest via rolling releases isn’t so good if it results in support for your graphics card being withdrawn.
I’d personally rather use closed source drivers which work, rather than opensource ones which do not.
I’ve certainly had my fingers burned with AMD Radeon GPUs. I suspect my next GPU will be something along the lines of an Nvidia GTX1660 Super or similar.
You see, that’s just one frame and it took 4:30 in 960*540px! Imagine rendering a 10s animation
I’ve done a glitch effect where I put a lens element, and emissive path behind it. It takes roughly 60s min per frame. That is too much especially on my GPU on which they advertised millions of polygons being rendered in less than 30 seconds in 8k.
Guys, OpenCL is an off-loading computing library. Just because OpenGL, aka the graphics lib used in GUI painting and games real-time rendering, works “great” doesn’t mean OpenCL is supported as well. “Drivers” mean nothing.
Do you have any experience running AMD and Nvidia gpu on the same system at the same time?
I wonder if that could work ok because I’d like to move to Nvidia but I don’t want to have an 800eur AMD gpu sitting on a shelf.
It’s like when I started with 3d studio 4 “some years ago” in my 486SX (SX = no i487 math coprocessor). Years later I had a pentium with coprocessor, what a difference!
I know the difference between OpenGL and OpenCL. Also most of the time I find users complaining about older generation cards like RX 580, and that people got frustrated here is conprehensible.