Blender 3.0 has now been released, and the Blender Cycles X update is now supported via the latest AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.12.1 or the Radeon PRO Software for Enterprise 21.Q4 drivers, offering significant performance improvements.
Broadly speaking, the goal of the new release is to build upon previous versions’ UI and workflows, and to improve it further. Blender 3.0 offers several improvements to the user experience across the entire 3D pipeline. Highlights include a node-based procedural modeling system and advanced asset browsing and management.
A complete refresh of the code and architecture of the Blender Cycles rendering engine is also part of the new Blender version. To support these changes, AMD has developed a new way to take the standard code that Blender uses for GPU acceleration in the new “Cycles X” update and have compiled it for AMD devices, using the open-source AMD HIP API. AMD’s AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.12.1 or Radeon PRO Software for Enterprise 21.Q4 (or newer) drivers are required to use Cycles in Blender 3.0. Support is currently validated on AMD Radeon PRO W6800 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series desktop GPUs and enabled on other AMD RDNA and AMD RDNA 2 architecture graphics cards.
Highlights of the major update to the Blender Cycles renderer include much-improved GPU rendering performance, better viewport interactivity, revamped sampling settings, new GPU volume sampling, and more. AMD is delivering a significantly better user experience in Blender 3.0 thanks to our support for these improvements to Cycles. When using the Blender 3.0 Cycles X renderer with the AMD HIP API, the AMD Radeon PRO W6800 renders across eight Blender scenes at a combined average of 1.97x than when rendered using the Blender 2.93.5 Cycles renderer with OpenCL.
When using the Blender 3.0 Cycles X renderer with the AMD HIP API, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT renders across 8 Blender scenes at a combined average of 2.12x than when rendered using the Blender 2.93.5 Cycles renderer with OpenCL.