Too bad they’re not optimizing for the later Nvidia cards and CUDA so much…
Sergey recently did a number of commits that introduces the split-kernel structure for CUDA (much like with OpenCL).
This is a major optimization in and of itself because it promises major memory reductions along with performance improvements.
Me ears are up now.
please guys tell me when will we get faster transparent shadow on AMD ! can we hope !
You can already have fast shadows with my 2.75 build. As far as I know, there is nothing new in 2.76 that make your blend incompatible. So you work on 2.76/Buildbot, and you render the final one on my build. Note that for some reason transparent shadows don’t work with crimson drivers on my build (but they do on buildbot with megakernel).
You can also activate the megakernel if you want to do everything with one build. But it’s slower (your AMD card will be as fast as the NVidia price equivalent on CUDA).
But I’m really busy at the moment and the devs seem to wait for AMD to do all the work now. We still miss some features, CUDA guys did get years long cuda-specific bugfixes and features and now they get some more. I’m happy to help, but I don’t see why I should do the job of paid devs when they do nothing in this regard. From my point of view, I’m already happy to be able to render 6x faster than a GTX980Ti for half the price with 2x 280X (3x time with transparent shadows, but it’s already really good isn’t it?).
Hi, could you explain this for me, what is 4x speed for AMD rendering.
you can already have fast shadows with my 2.75 build. As far as i know, there is nothing new in 2.76 that make your blend incompatible. So you work on 2.76/buildbot, and you render the final one on my build. Note that for some reason transparent shadows don’t work with crimson drivers on my build (but they do on buildbot with megakernel).
You can also activate the megakernel if you want to do everything with one build. But it’s slower (your amd card will be as fast as the nvidia price equivalent on cuda).
But i’m really busy at the moment and the devs seem to wait for amd to do all the work now. We still miss some features, cuda guys did get years long cuda-specific bugfixes and features and now they get some more. I’m happy to help, but i don’t see why i should do the job of paid devs when they do nothing in this regard. From my point of view, i’m already happy to be able to render 6x faster than a gtx980ti for half the price with 2x 280x (3x time with transparent shadows, but it’s already really good isn’t it?).
super sad !
Sometimes i ask myself where to find documentation for coding or where to start to fix by myself these bug !
Sometimes i said if there we create a special way to have what we need in blender in time this could be very very helpfull !
let me explain ! it will be like special donation for very specific task ! external dev help for blender that will grant most need features of blender USER.Maybe something like this
You should contact Blender devs and AMD for this but I don’t know how to contact AMD-
My idea is bit like this site does but integreated to blender community !
Are you talking about AMD devs or Blender devs? The developers employed by Blender Institute and Blender Foundation get paid for bug fixes, patch reviews and general support so they basically get paid to help you 
(Note: I know that Open Movies are an exception).
Depends on what you want to know. If you’re not versed in C/C++ yet, there are plenty of resources on the web. For learning about the inner works of a path tracing engine, PBRT is IMHO the best book. If you have any specific questions, the cycles mailing list is the best place to ask.
Well, I had one patch commited in master, but for the transparent shadow patch (yes transparent shadows work on AMD since catalyst 15.7), i simply had no answer from the devs and now the patch is old and it would be again lot of work to port it to 2.77. I provided builds for them to see without compiling themself, but it didn’t help. I’ll be very happy to get help to get my patches to master if they do provide help. I learn a bit about debugging and writing clean code, and you get 4x speedup in viewport and very fast transparent shadows.
i have a few patches in master myself, but they are all small ones. Large chunks are harder to get in because there is a lot more the devs need to review. For larger chunks a branch is also better than a patch. Could you create a branch like maybe on GitHub and then submit a patch on developer.blender.org?
A publich branch on GitHub would allow other users to compile it themselves easily and maybe even create builds for various platforms, report bugs and problems etc. This way you could get more support for the inclusion of your patch.
I don’t know if this is the right thread to ask but I’m debating on this.
Im going to buy a Graphics Card for my PC, and I’m stuck at deciding between AMD R9 380 or Gtx 960.
Is it ok now to buy AMD card - r9 380 to specific for blender, or is it better for me to go for Nvidias gtx 960 if my sole purpose is digital painting and modelling (Blender). Which I do as a hobby.
In my opinion and who after three month searched and asked, Definitely for with R9 380 4GB, even if 380x there go with it, also AMD’s new Crimson Driver is amazingly faster than before, I myself got Asus R9 390 DC2. I am so happy with.
Good luck
there is donation like as Kickstarter? where i will see pay for donation to patch or fix for AMD, future i will buy R9 390X 8GB of RAM (important to use full share memory if add others cards? see http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2014/10/24/opencl-2-shared-virtual-memory/
i’m like to see little plan or roadmap for patch, see example proposal :
[ATTACH=CONFIG]413226[/ATTACH]
other best suggest: when will starts to development code then BEST devs will come together and work together not a distance, because peoples needed meet alive, share them know, and share together minds ok? maybe will be good idea all devs will come in istituto blender. Amsterdam is beautiful.
good luck!!
you can show me your screen record on youtube for your result test render time…?
thank you
Here are list of feature not yet supported on AMD cards https://www.blender.org/manual/render/cycles/features.html
You could start from here what to learn and how to implement it.
I would contact the BF before doing any fundraiser like this, just to make sure that massive patches aren’t just thrown onto their doorstep without notice (they might have critique on things like design and code practices).
Is there a set of instructions anywhere that I can follow in order to turn on Transparent Shadows? I recently bought a R9 390X card