Radeon ProRender Blender

shaneseymourstudio

I have been following Threadripper 2nd generation information recently and stumbled on something called "Radeon ProRender" render plugins that are available for several mainstream software apps like Blender, Maya, Cinema4d, etc.:

https://pro.radeon.com/en/software/prorender/

This renderer has apparently been out for some time but I only just saw it on a computex video showcasing the Threadripper 2nd gen as well as the new 7nm GPU with 32GB. I am interested in trying the plugin for Blender for the denoising and hardware agnostic capabilities, which I understand cycles can do as well, but particularly because I am planning on building a Threadripper 2nd gen machine when they launch and would love to be able to use Radeon cards that can offer more bang for the buck with renderers that can utilize them.

So, my question/reason for this thread is if anyone has experience with this renderer in Blender?

I've looked at a couple of videos on it and also at the plugin for mcjTeleblender to move out the objects/scenes to Blender from Daz. It seems that there are a few shortcomings and things I will have to research for this but would love any info from your experiences with this process in regards to ProRender since the mcjTeleblender script only offers for Cycles or Blender's default renderer, whether it will work for this if exporting for cycles but then swapping to ProRender renderer within Blender since it uses Uber materials.

I am wholy unexperienced and new to Blender but really want to try out at least one scene rendering with ProRender in it so anyone with experience regarding this I would love anything you can share.

Thanks.

Takeo.Kensei

I played a bit with it (was in beta program)

Good integration inside Blender

Worked with GTX Card (even Quadro) without problem provided you have OpenCL drivers

Also worked with Win 7 although minimal spec was Windows 10

AMD provides many PBR shaders. The only problem with these is that they are not a big monolithic shader so you could be afraid when looking at the nodes

AMD also provided a shadow catcher and a good HDR lightning integration

I find that the Blender plugin is a job welll done

Only drawback was that is was slower than Cycles at the time I tested (don't know if things have changed since)

 

If you want to use blender because you want to use Radeon gfx card, you should know you can also use Cycles with Radeon https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Render/Cycles/OpenCL ( you need to set an environment variable for it to work)

There are benchmarks for blender 2.79 here https://pro.radeon.com/en/amd-radeon-radeon-pro-gpus-speed-blender-benchmarks/

 

Another point for me would be : does RRPro make any sense when Evee is coming? I think that AMD was a bit late here and they are trying to catch up

 

 

 

nonesuch00

I have it installed but am disappointed that both Blender & the AMD Radion ProRender does not do openCL on intel HD Graphics chips. It is a requirement of these graphics algorithms they have the capability to parallelise on all the capable HW available on a single PC & that would include intel HD Graphics & Intel CPU.

shaneseymourstudio

Takeo.Kensei said:

I played a bit with it (was in beta program)

Good integration inside Blender

Worked with GTX Card (even Quadro) without problem provided you have OpenCL drivers

Also worked with Win 7 although minimal spec was Windows 10

AMD provides many PBR shaders. The only problem with these is that they are not a big monolithic shader so you could be afraid when looking at the nodes

AMD also provided a shadow catcher and a good HDR lightning integration

I find that the Blender plugin is a job welll done

Only drawback was that is was slower than Cycles at the time I tested (don't know if things have changed since)

 

If you want to use blender because you want to use Radeon gfx card, you should know you can also use Cycles with Radeon https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Render/Cycles/OpenCL ( you need to set an environment variable for it to work)

There are benchmarks for blender 2.79 here https://pro.radeon.com/en/amd-radeon-radeon-pro-gpus-speed-blender-benchmarks/

 

Another point for me would be : does RRPro make any sense when Evee is coming? I think that AMD was a bit late here and they are trying to catch up

 

 

 

Thanks for the links and info.

I am not sure Blender at all makes sense in my workflow. I want to try one scene in blender from Daz to see what I see I suppose. Mainly the appeal with RRPro is that it offers similar materials as iRay and even if your GPU doesn't have the memory for the scene it will not fail or fall over to the cpu like Daz but instead alot to RAM. I am not sure yet if I will go with Radeon graphics but am considering it and since that allows cpu/gpu usage mix from both nVidia cards and Radeon it seems very versatile. I have heard about Evee but am not familiar with what it offers.