We don’t have to jump to conclusions, AMD and Blender have both stated a few posts up that its unlikely they will support Polaris.
Opendata shows some interesting history on the progression of Blender hardware. Keep in mind:
- Opendata no longer allows 2.9 OpenCL tests
- OpenCL tests aren’t exclusive to AMD hardware
- Some Metal tests contain AMD hardware
- Opendata lags Blender release by days or months
- Command used to filter data, eg METAL users for July 2022:
grep ‘“created_at”: "2022-07’ ./opendata.jsonl | grep -c ‘“device_type”: “METAL”’
It would appear AMD’s HIP implementation didn’t meet expectations and they lost user share compared to the old OpenCL implementation. I think the following items have contributed:
- AMD being unable to provide hardware ray-tracing support in Blender for 641 days and counting since the RDNA2 release.
- Polaris and Vega remaining unsupported 258 days and counting after Blender 3.0+ release
- RDNA currently having bugged texture support 258 days and counting after Blender 3.0+ release.
- AMD GPU hardware not being competitive in cost per performance when compared to other hardware vendors.
- HIP and ROCM being relatively new software.
- HIP and ROCM being generally disliked by the software community (probably applies to most software).