Cycles AMD HIP device feedback

[Alaska]

@Ardvaark-Radical

Since it doesn’t look like HIP will ever be possible on older cards like hawaii gpus and such any chance that the AMD-flavoured dev going into HIP might spawn a spin-off series with Vulkan?

It is possible for a developer to go in an add a Vulkan rendering backend for Cycles, however I believe this is unlikely to happen or be accepted into the Cycles code base. See Brecht’s response to my question about implementing Vulkan here:

2021-08-31 Blender Rendering Meeting

All information that we can make public about plans for other GPUs is public, that’s all I can say about that. Vulkan has limitations in how you can write kernels, in practice you can’t currently use pointers for example. But also, GPU vendors will recommend certain platforms for writing production renderers, provide support around that, and various renderers will use it. Choosing a different platform means you will hit more bugs and limitations, have slower or no access to certain features, ar…