Blender for Linux arm64 with denoise

Building Blender
1

I am on Ubuntu 23.10 (beta) with Blender 3.6.2+dfsg-2ubuntu1 from the default repositories. This forum post suggests that the new ARM Blender builds have denoise, but I still get “Build without OpenImageDenoiser” when I render an image with “denoise” checked.

How can I compile Blender for Linux with denoise support? It was originally disabled because Embree and OpenImageDenoise did not support ARM, but ARM has been supported by those two for a while now.

> apt-cache policy blender
blender:
  Installed: 3.6.2+dfsg-2ubuntu1
  Candidate: 3.6.2+dfsg-2ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 3.6.2+dfsg-2ubuntu1 500
        500 http://mycountry.clouds.ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports mantic/universe arm64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
2

The OpenImageDenoise library supports Arm, but the Blender Debian package doesn’t seems to support it on either x86 or Arm.

You’d have to build the libraries yourself then, which is possible but likely requires some manual work:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Building_Blender/Linux/Ubuntu#Portable_Builds

The make deps command performs the cmake setup and build. It is mainly used by platform maintainers and is not tested to work on many different operating system installs. A successful build may require some manual configuration or edits to the code

3

but the Blender Debian package doesn’t seems to support it on either x86 or Arm.

I see. I’ve been downloading from Download — blender.org for x86_64 and denoise does work.

Will ARM64 builds ever be provided there, or on the experimental downloads?

4

There are no concrete plans for it yet. But it might happen at some point when there is more demand for it.

5

I (and I know hundreds/thousands) of others on ARM64 linux would love this.

Blender is talked about at least weekly in ARM64 Linux discord servers I am a part of and upstream support with official builds would be very appreciated.

I took a look at the buildfiles and it seems (to me) that everything is already architecture agnostic (or supports both x64 and arm64 already) blender/cmake at main - blender - Blender Projects

What does blender need to make this happen? ARM64 hardware (easy to get → one free decently powerful ARM64 4 Core 24GB ram 200GB storage server from Oracle Cloud Free Tier | Oracle I have had one for over a year now)? Developers? Time?

6

It mainly requires time. From platform maintainers to build libraries and fix issues, triaging and release team to test on more platforms, GPU team to support and test more hardware, etc. It’s unfortunately not something that can easily be done by a single person, but takes some time from multiple people who are already busy.

Blender does generally build on ARM, and make deps for libraries also worked at some point but might require a few tweaks now. So it should be possible for someone technical to make their own build.