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Amd Rendering4/21/2021
We have worked extensively with AMD for several weeks to explore aspects of Blender performance on GCN GPUs.With the 5700 XT having debuted recently, we had an opportunity to return to this question with a new GPU architecture from AMD and compare RDNA against GCN.
In fact, the overall compute situation is at an interesting crossroads. AMD has declared that it wishes to be a more serious player in enterprise compute environments but has also said that GCN will continue to exist alongside RDNA in this space. The Radeon VII is a consumer variant of AMDs MI50 accelerator, with half-speed FP64 support. If you know you need double-precision FP64 compute, for example, the Radeon VII fills that niche in a way that no other GPU in this comparison does. The Radeon VII has the highest RAM bandwidth and its the only GPU in this comparison to offer much in the way of double-precision performance. But while these GPUs have relatively similar on-paper specs, theres significant variance between them in terms of performance and the numbers dont always break the way you think they would. One of AMDs major talking points with the 5700 XT is now Navi represents a fundamentally new GPU architecture. The 5700 XT proved itself to be moderately faster than the Vega 64 in our testing on the consumer side of the equation, but we wanted to check the situation in compute as well. Keep in mind, however, that the 5700 XTs newness also works against us a bit here. Amd Rendering Full Advantage OfSome applications may need to be updated to take full advantage of its capabilities. Regarding Blender 2.80 Our test results contain data from both Blender 2.80 and the standalone Blender benchmark, 1.0beta2 (released August 2018). Blender 2.80 is a major release for the application, and it contains a number of significant changes. The standalone benchmark is not compatible with Nvidias RTX family, which necessitated testing with the latest version of the software. Initially, we tested the Blender 2.80 beta, but then the final version dropped so we dumped the beta results and retested. Image by Blender There are significant performance differences between the Blender 1.0beta2 benchmark and 2.80 and one scene, Classroom, does not render properly in the new version. This scene has been dropped from our 2.80 comparisons. Blender allows the user to specify a tile size in pixels to control how much of the scene is worked on at once. Code in the Blender 1.0beta2 benchmarks Python files indicates that the test uses a tile size of 512512 (XY coordinates) for GPUs and 1616 for CPUs. Most of the scene files actually contained within the benchmark, however, actually use a tile size of 3232 by default if loaded within Blender 2.80. We tested Blender 2.80 in two different modes. First, we tested all compatible scenes using the default tile size those scenes loaded with. This was 1616 for BarbershopInterior, and 3232 for all other scenes. Next, we tested the same renders with a default tile size of 512512. Up until now, the rule with tile sizes has been that larger sizes were good for GPUs, while smaller sizes were good for CPUs. ![]() AMD and Nvidia GPUs show very different responses to larger tile sizes, with AMD GPUs accelerating with higher tile sizes and Nvidia GPUs losing performance. Because the scene files we are testing were created in an older version of Blender, its possible that this might be impacting our overall results.
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