The last issue of the meeting amd representative said windows driver released in November
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I think this thing amd internal should exist in a large number of machines to simulate the test, they should have professional tools to capture the hidden deep bugs, the number of samples should be much more than the user test
Personally I would take HIP in Blender 3.0 at any level of stability.
Since OpenCL support has been removed already, that leaves AMD GPU users with little other choice. Either HIP works or we have no GPU acceleration with 3.0…
So even if it’s buggy, I’ll take HIP in 3.0. Even if I have to compile it myself, which I hope I won’t have to do.
Hopefully it all comes together in time for the Blender 3.0 release.
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We hope HIP will still be ready for 3.0, but it’s all a bit tricky since this is based on new drivers and SDK. It’s a bit unusual to leave it this late still, we just really want to support AMD GPUs if possible rather than being NVIDIA only.
If it’s not stable enough we move it to 3.1, but then we can still have daily builds of 3.1 with HIP support around the time of the 3.0 release.
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Hi, how soon can we expect the first metal patch to be out?
The goal is to have this ready for Blender 3.1, and for that the Metal implementation needs to be in master by December 29 with the current release planning. Still this is a project under development and this is being contributed incrementally, it’s hard to predict when it will be in a state ready for testing.
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I appreciate everything you do for us Brecht. I know it must be difficult trying to balance schedules, tough coding challenges, multiple stake holders and user demands (including users who regrettably can sometimes be very pushy/rude in their messages or often not even realise their demands are already being worked on, etc).
Hopefully it will all come together at the last minute and given how major this change is (I mean, how often does one really change compute APIs?), hopefully this is a one-off problem we won’t have to deal with for another decade. 
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Thanks for the update 
Still with the name calling … Oh god… Some ppl.
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Does it mean adding upon the patch that apple sent to increase performance?
Let’s keep it civil and stick to the forum guidelines:
https://devtalk.blender.org/faq
To be clear, the Cycles HIP implementation is being developed in the open, patches are being contributed by AMD and we review them. What’s happening now is that AMD is testing this implementation on various hardware and making improvements to the drivers and/or compiler. That could be in open source projects for the Linux driver, or closed source for the Windows driver, but either way that development is not happening on developer.blender.org.
I’m not sure which patch you are referring to? What is currently being worked on is a series of patches that together will add Metal support, and we will review and commit them one by one.
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The one that Ton twitted about on Twitter. Thanks for solving my problems.
Hi Guys. AMD person here…
We are planning to get a driver available on windows for testing in the next two weeks (likely around 10-15 November but not promises).
As Brecht said. We’re working on some compatibility for older cards (than 6000 series) patches this week that should be pushed in the next day or so. But the “official” driver support for 3.0 will be on 6000 series on windows, even if other cards do work. The Linux driver with this updated HIP support is looking like February 2022-ish. We working on Blender are doing as much as we can to support a wide variety of cards and platform.
Hope that helps with the questions!
Brian
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What should the users of the 6000 range expect from the HIP implementation rendering performance wise?
I can’t give even vague numbers as things are still moving and this is a developers forum. But generally I’d expect similar performance to the CUDA backend on similar cards.
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That’s really great, I can’t wait to buy rdna3 with 3x the floating point performance of my current graphics card!
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Hi Brian,
How are you? hope fine.
Do you think the card Radeon DUO Polaris 32gb will be supported too? we have a couple of that card here and would be nice to have support for them too, like for a lot of RX580/590 that Amd has sold.
Thank you.
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Thanks for the update Brian. Looking forward to this a lot!!
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21.11.2 driver or no hip ah! Is the driver used for testing the driver from the official website or is it a separate driver downloaded specifically for testing?