Can Blender use GPU's for animation and other tasks, or just for rendering?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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As the title says:

Can Blender use GPU’s for animation and other processor-intensive tasks, or are they just for rendering?

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Uh, obviously, GPUs drive the viewport, so of course they’re used for animation. If you’re asking if they compute deformations and such, then no.

Well, they can compute the subsurf modifier if you’re using OpenSubdiv, but that’s still too early in development to seriously use.

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Thank you, that’s what I was asking.

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“OpenGL Preview” renders use it, I believe. GameBlender certainly does.

These things use the GPU for its intended purpose. But GPUs are “massively-parallel array mathematical processors” (among other things) which can be used for certain pure-computational tasks, as Cycles of course does. A GPU has many floating-point processing units that can do things literally at the same time. Whereas the CPU would have to iterate over an array, performing math operations one at a time, the GPU can process all of the elements, literally “simultaneously.” Cycles’ very clever (and, very different) approach to rendering is specifically designed to exploit that capability.

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Thank you sundialsvc4. The thing is I use Octane Render’s version of Blender and that version does use GPUs for rendering - but they are disabled in the Preferences. (Meaning, I assume, that my GPUs only are active when I’m actually rendering.)

However, I’m doing a lot of animation and could obviously use all the processing power I can get, so I wondered if it would make any difference to use the ordinary Blender version for pure animation purposes, and only use the Octane version for rendering…

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GPU can be used for compositing if you enable OpenCL in the options.

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Thank you, doublebishop.