HIP RT enables AMD hardware ray tracing on RDNA2 and above, and falls back to a
to shader implementation for older graphics cards. It offers an average 25%
sample rendering rate improvement in Cycles benchmarks, on a W6800 card.
The ray tracing feature functions are accessed through HIP RT SDK, available on
GPUOpen. HIP RT traversal functionality is pre-compiled in bitcode format and
shipped with the SDK.
This is not yet enabled as there are issues to be resolved, but landing the
code now makes testing and further changes easier.
Known limitations:
* Not working yet with current public AMD drivers.
* Visual artifact in motion blur.
* One of the buffers allocated for traversal has a static size. Allocating it
dynamically would reduce memory usage.
* This is for Windows only currently, no Linux support.
Co-authored-by: Brecht Van Lommel <brecht@blender.org>
Ref #105538
Using the new HIP SDK 5.5 that includes a fix for the compiler bug.
This also enables the light tree.
For Linux the binaries are still disabled. ROCm 5.5 is planned to
include the same fix but not released yet. When that happens we
should be able to enable Linux as well.
Ref #104786Fix#104085
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/107098
Updated Embree 4 library with GPU support is required for it to be
compiled - compatiblity with Embree 3 and Embree 4 without GPU support
is maintained.
Enabling hardware raytracing is an opt-in user setting for now.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/106266
This patch replaces `dispatchThreadgroups` with `dispatchThreads` which takes care of non-uniform threadgroup bounds. This allows us to remove the bounds guards in the integrator kernel entry points.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/106217
For example
```
OIIOOutputDriver::~OIIOOutputDriver()
{
}
```
becomes
```
OIIOOutputDriver::~OIIOOutputDriver() {}
```
Saves quite some vertical space, which is especially handy for
constructors.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/105594
Workaround for a crash when `addComputePipelineFunctionsWithDescriptor` is called *after* `newComputePipelineStateWithDescriptor` with linked functions (i.e. with MetalRT enabled). Ideally we would like to call `newComputePipelineStateWithDescriptor` (async) first so we can bail out if needed, but we can stop the crash by flipping the order when there are linked functions. However when addComputePipelineFunctionsWithDescriptor is called first it will block while it builds the pipeline, offering no way of bailing out.
Note that this only has an impact when the "MetalRT (Experimental)" option is checked.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/105629
The traversable handle of a BLAS may be zero when the relevant geometry
is empty (no triangles/curves/points/...), as no BLAS is built in such cases.
It is not correct to attach a zero handle to a TLAS, so filter out such instances.
When running unit tests or other fast completing renders, forced crashes can occur if there are any slow, outstanding PSO compilation requests (due to the `std::terminate` fall-back case in `~ShaderCache`).
This patch eliminates the need for this shutdown hack by using of the async version of `newComputePipelineStateWithDescriptor` when creating a PSO for the first time. In doing so, we are able to explicitly respond to app shutdown instead of waiting for the pipeline to finish compiling (..and then timing out and force-crashing). We still use the blocking version of `newComputePipelineStateWithDescriptor` when loading from an archive, as this can handle loading from a corrupted archive gracefully. Finally, we move `addComputePipelineFunctionsWithDescriptor` to *after* the PSO is built (as this will trigger a full blocking compile if the PSO has not yet been built, which would bring back the original issue).
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/105506
This patch fixes hanging unit tests when MetalRT is enabled. It simplifies and fixes the kernel selection logic by baking the MetalRT-specific options into `kernels_md5` rather than expanding out and testing MetalRT bit flags explicitly.
Pull Request #105270
To improve mesh upload speeds and reduce the size of the scene data which allows larger scenes to be rendered.
The meshes in Cycles are currently stored as flattened meshes, where each triangle is stored as a set of 3 vertices. Unflattening writes out the vertices in a list according to the index buffer. This uses a lot of memory and for current hardware does not provide a noticeable benefit. This change unflattens the mesh by directly using the meshes vertex and index buffers directly and skips the unflattening. This change allows for larger scenes and also a reduction in the sizes of the meshes. Further it results in a decrease the amount of time it takes to upload the data to a GPU. This is especially important for when multiple GPUs are used in a single machine.
Pull Request #105173
This is a workaround for [issue #104087](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/104087). We encounter crashes when using shader binary archives on AMD, so this disables them while we investigate a proper fix. Kernels will still be cached automatically by the OS file system cache. This cache may occasionally be purged due to external factors, in which case kernels will get compiled again.
Pull Request #105186
This fixes issue [#105100](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/105100) where multi-pass renders can be incorrect due to kernels using stale specialisation constants (e.g. when rendering Pokedstudio).
This patch adds a new group of md5 hashes (`global_defines_md5`) to track whether the injected block of #defines is stale and regenerate the source string as appropriate. It also renames the existing group of md5 hashes from `source_md5` to `kernels_md5` to clarify that these refer to a specific kernel set rather than just the source (which might build an arbitrarily large number of kernel sets).
Pull Request #105103
Contributed by Yulia Kuznetcova at Apple.
NanoVDB is patched to give add address spaces required by Metal. We hope that
in the future Metal will support the generic address space.
For AMD and Intel this is currently not available since it causes a performance
regression also on scenes without volumes.
Pull Request #104837
The internal compiler error appears to be gone. Unclear why it appeared in the
first place and why it's gone now. Just random kernel code changes causing it.
Pull Request #104719
(Follow on from D17043)
On AMD Navi2 devices the MetalRT checkbox was not hooked up properly and had no effect. This patch fixes it.
Co-authored-by: Michael Jones <michael_p_jones@apple.com>
Pull Request #104520
Host memory fallback in CUDA and HIP devices is almost identical.
We remove duplicated code and create a shared generic version that
other devices (oneAPI) will be able to use.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D17173
This patch optimises subsurface intersection queries on MetalRT. Currently intersect_local traverses from the scene root, retrospectively discarding all non-local hits. Using a lookup of bottom level acceleration structures, we can explicitly query only the relevant instance. On M1 Max, with MetalRT selected, this can give a render speedup of 15-20% for scenes like Monster which make heavy use of subsurface scattering.
Patch authored by Marco Giordano.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D17153
