General Discussions

[elstaci]

Happened to be assisting a ProRender User at AMD ProRender Forum because his GPU card and another User suddenly stopped working with ProRender.

DAVID_S inquired with the developers and was told that all R9 Series AMD GPU cards are not supported anymore by ProRender.

Here is the thread concerning this new development concerning R9 Series GPU cards and ProRender: AGAIN - PRORENDER DOESN'T RECOGNIZE GRAPHIC CARD>!>! any help? 

EDIT: Here is the official answer concerning the R9 compatibility in ProRender which was just posted a minute ago:

First I would like to sincerely apologize to DAVID_S. plus AMD Manager of Radeon ProRender has clarified exactly what R9 GPU cards are not compatible:

[black_zion]

Thing is though, if you look at all of the release notes, except for Creo, all of them were updated last week and all of them feature a chart like the pictured Unreal Engine one which does state R9 series support, and it doesn't seem logical that AMD would have kept them up for this long if it weren't true.

I don't believe david_s is affiliated with AMD because he lacks the AMD logo in his username that Matt, Ray, and the others have.

[elstaci]

AMD Manager of Radeon ProRender Project has confirmed and validated that all GPUs earlier then the RX400 series GPUs may not work or be compatible with ProRender.

AMD Manager also confirmed that DAVID_S does work for the Radeon ProRender Project and helps support in the forums.

Plus all charts are showing incorrect information about the compatibility or R9 GPUs and ProRender because the AMD Manager is in the process of updating the Compatibility Charts.

[Ray_AMD]

The Release Notes have been updated.

[black_zion]

So it was a case of many parts of AMD not talking to each other and relating things correctly, not the first time that's happened.

Still, it's interesting to see AMD terminate support for older, yet still relatively computationally powerful, R9 and Fury cards without explanation...

[elstaci]

According to the AMD Manager is was due to OpenCL issues with those GPU cards.

Plus I imagine most Users that use ProRender have newer RX series or Professional GPU cards.

But the ProRender Developers should have put out some type of Warning before making those GPUs incompatible because most likely the AMD Forums might start having many complaints about their Non-RX series GPUs not working in ProRender plug-ins.

[black_zion]

Photographic professionals certainly do because of jackrabbits like Adobe requiring the use of FirePro cards for 10 bit color despite Radeon cards being perfectly capable, but architects, interior designers, landscapers, body shops, and other such users which benefit greatly from renders but are not dependent upon professional level color accuracy, can use AMD ProRender for their trades, at least going by how AMD markets it, and computationally the R9 290 is still as good as the RX 580, and the Fury series is much better. Yes it's only an additional $175 investment for them to continue using AMD PR, but if they see that Non-AMD GPUs still work while AMD's GPUs do not, that could make them jump to team green.

[elstaci]

Well spoken words because the OP that opened the thread at 3DS MAX was using a R9 380X because ProRender wouldn't even recognize it was forced to use a RTX Nvidia GPU Card instead.  Says it works great without any issues but so had the R9 380X before.

Seems like the OP was an AMD fan but now needed to go green to get to Render with ProRender after I mentioned he had two choices. Either upgrade the AMD GPU or find another GPU that is still supported by ProRender. 

But I imagine many will just upgrade the AMD GPUs instead since they are built well and are less expensive then Nvidia and are just or almost as powerful as Nvidia GPUs.

[pokester]

Well it is becoming a bit of a trend lately that to fix the issue you just drop support and never fix the issue. Great way to guarantee your customers look elsewhere. IMHO it is a shame the customer had to buy a new card as likely that card was sufficient for what they do. Hopefully they are enjoying the speed boost and drivers that work. 

[black_zion]

Which is why we get articles like this for Team Green...

...While with Team Red we get

[rancax]

ha - nice comments... Well thing is - as I can tell from a point of non-programmer - opencl 2.0 is open cl 2.0 = maybe new features of updated RPR somehow not playing well with hardware architecture on r9 cards, as I understood everything regarding gpu rendering since its opencl language has to be recompiled in order to use it by gpu's hardware - another reason why it is slower than cuda framework - and not to mention that almost all gpu based renderers are using cuda... Only as I have seen redshift is announcing that theirs rendering engine is under development for opencl to use - I guessing they are waiting realtime raytracing features in amd cards to implement it... 
and of course - big companies like amd, intel, nvidia are just dropping support and forcing you to buy new products just because of money flow, and technical improvements - no one is going to make a gpu that will last for 15 years - profit and technical boundaries must be moved. I think they can make it work maybe for r9 cl issues to be resolved but, it's just easier to drop support and move to powerful products... it's just how industry works... 
btw - not to advertise here anything but maxwell - uses cuda, and can utilize all gpu's in system,doesn't have restrictions like redshift - whre only one gpu and it's memory can be used for rendering - more complex and it's forcing you to by titan's or quadro's very expensive cards...  
on 2070 rtx - I tried RPR - works very nice - but now I get to choose where to work - cuda or open cl - and must say cuda's framework is pretty fast... 
Maybe with big next rdna cards - rpr and redshift will blow all other renderers but just have to wait and see...
cheers