Blender ATI Cycles Support!

If you know me, you know that I'm very attached to my ATI cards. Unfortunately, since Blender's Cycles Render Engine came along, only nVidia GPUs have been able to truly harness it's power. The problem was AMD's ATI kernel, that would crash on rendering. It was very bleak for ATI owners, and the only hope was to switch to nVidia, and I myself was not about to drop a bunch of money on a new card. Near the end of 2014, AMD finally fixed the ATI kernel, so development continued for the ATI Cycles functionality. Here is what is happening....





On March 24th this year, the OpenCL Kernel Splitting Patch was released along side Blender 2.74, followed by a lot of love from ATI owners. This was the patch to show progress for the ATI Cycles development. I myself ran across it on complete accident. I was rendering a scene that was too big for my little nVidia, which was mainly used for viewport rendering. Out of desperation to save time, I switched to my ATI card in the user preferences, and rendered away. It wasn't but seven minutes later that I found that my scene was fully rendered without a single issue.

After this momentous render, I quickly learned about the patch, along with Thomas Dingus' Windows ATI patch; a patch that made ATI renders even faster on the Window x64 build. While it made ATI Cycles rendering much faster, it did remove viewport rendering, replaced with black; a familiar sight for many ATI owners using Blender.

Still, after rendering the new Revision 4 BMW test scene, I realized that my ATI GPU had aged. The Blender Artists forum was full of render times done by R7s, R9s, 290s, and 295s. Their 50 second render times made me expect something similar, but my HD 7950 only rendered as fast as 5 minutes and 26 seconds. No matter what, it was time for a new card, because even with a fully functional rendering engine, my card wouldn't help me very much anymore.

While I drooled over the new ATI 290x2 8GB cards, I knew that it would be a continuous battle of switching between two cards like I am now; an ATI HD 7950 4GB, and nVidia 650 GTX 2GB. After a year of that, and my projects getting larger everyday, I hate to say, "I can't do that anymore". While I didn't completely give in, I did wait for a opportune time. With the dual GPU ATIs being released, nVidia finally became cheaper, and I ordered a 4GB nVidia 960 GT for $240 (and the new FX9590 CPU; I might as well do it all, right?). It wasn't too much to hurt me, and just enough power to satisfy me until the ATI support is here.

There is still a lot to do before we see the support nVidia has right now with it's CUDA functionality in Cycles, we aren't far off from ATI support. At this moment in time, it's missing hair particles, SSS, and the usual scatter effects. Sort of like Cycles functionality overall at this same time last year.