Enabling OpenCL with AMD GPUs for darktable and blender

[boredcollie]

Recent tumbleweed updates have broken support for AMD GPU drivers.

I am aware that the AMDGPU PRO driver is not supported - it is written on the first page of the wiki - even though it worked with the SLE 15.5 repositories until recently.

I don’t know who to blame, but I’m not here to complain but just to see what alternatives I have.

I’d like to continue working with darktable and blender and if I can’t find a solution to have openCL available I’m thinking of a possible downgrade to Leap 15.5. Although I really hate to give up the current tumbleweed because apart from the AMD drivers, the rest works pretty damn well.

Besides my RX 6700 XT GPU I have an RTX 2070 SUPER and if the NVIDIA drivers are better supported I’m willing to make the switch and flush AMD down the toilet.

I am a bit confused about what to do and would love your opinion.

DItch AMD in favor of NVIDIA?
Downgrade tumbleweed > leap 15.5? Is feasible and without pain?

Thanks.

[malcolmlewis]

@boredcollie have a look at using Distrobox with Leap?

ROCm / HIP cookbook for any distro! Tested with Blender and Stable Diffusion on Tumbleweed with AMD Radeon 7600

Hi all, I finally had some time to write down my adventures of getting ROCm to work on my machine. I got it working a couple of months ago, but now an update borked something and I had to redo most steps, so I finally have a good step by step guide for any distro (hopefully). If you don’t already know what ROCm is, why are you even reading this? If you want to learn more, read this first https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/rocm.html Now, let’s get started with the guide. The …

[boredcollie]

Thanks @malcolmlewis I’m having a look at distrobox, even if it looks like it’s opposite to my use case as it “Provide a mutable environment on an immutable OS”.

[malcolmlewis]

@boredcollie it works just as good an any release… I use it here from time to time on Tumbleweed

[ramdomPTM]

As of darktable, I am using Mesa-libRusticlOpenCL on Tumbleweed with a RX 6600 which got supported by darktable in version 4.6. Set RUSTICL_ENABLE=radeonsi and check Processing > OpenCL drivers > RustiCL in darktable preferences and you are good to go.

[Svyatko]

@boredcollie

Downgrade tumbleweed > leap 15.5? Is feasible and without pain?

What about dual boot TW + Leap?
Shrink TW partitions & install Leap or add drive to your system.

My manual for AMD GPGPU:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AMD_GPGPU

It is better to use Nvidia with Leap, AMD better supports TW than Nvidia because of frequent kernel changes.

For Blender: Blender devs drop OpenCL support since 3.0. With AMD you can use HIP or CUDA via ZLUDA.

For OpenCL: Rusticl from Mesa 3D is available for TW & Leap 15.6.

Look at Intel GPUs: Blender & OpenCL support. Open drivers means good TW support.
Maybe you can replace AMD RX 6700 XT with Intel Arc A770 16 GB. Intel A770 is faster in Blender than 6700 XT:

Blender - Open Data

Blender - Open Data

[boredcollie]

@ramdomPTM

As of darktable, I am using Mesa-libRusticlOpenCL on Tumbleweed with a RX 6600 which got supported by darktable in version 4.6. Set RUSTICL_ENABLE=radeonsi and check Processing > OpenCL drivers > RustiCL in darktable preferences and you are good to go.

hey @ramdomPTM with the Mesa-libRusticlOpenCL package and the variable, the OpenCL support works!

The only issue is that how can I make the variable persistent? I put it in my shell config (I’m using fish) and if I run darktable from the shell it openCL support is enabled but as soon as I start it from the KDE menu it looks like the variable is not set.

Any ideas?

[Svyatko]

HIP is available for TW:

Parts of AMD ROCm (HIP & others) are available on Tumbleweed

Main manual: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AMD_GPGPU#GPGPU_on_openSUSE_Tumbleweed openSUSE provides some packages with GPU:ROCm repository. For instance, installing AMD HIP (openSUSE Software): zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/science:GPU:ROCm/openSUSE_Factory/science:GPU:ROCm.repo zypper refresh zypper install hip Add GPU:ROCm repository into your system to see all available packages. This openSUSE-Factory repo is incompatible with Leap. After getting HIP you can …

That means programs (incl. Blender) can use HIP or CUDA via ZLUDA (not tested yet).

[Svyatko]

AMD OpenCL package is available for TW:

Parts of AMD ROCm (HIP & others) are available on Tumbleweed

AMD OpenCL package is available: https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/science:/GPU:/ROCm/openSUSE_Factory/x86_64/amd-opencl-18.0.0-1.118.x86_64.rpm

[ramdomPTM]

Hi @boredcollie! You can use KDE Menu Editor to add environment variables to applications, as shown in the picture.

Then save to apply and you can open darktable from application launcher.