What do I need to do to make Blender 4.1.1 allow allow GPU compute with HIP?

[OrangePulse]

Hi all,

I am certain that there is an answer to this already out there, but I cannot find any advice specific to my use-case.

I spent most of yesterday and the day before fighting my computer due to a driver update introducing a system-crippling bug, and eventually decided to just fresh install slowroll in place of tumbleweed. I have been on linux for a while, but I simply found that tumbleweed was a bit too cutting-edge for me to keep up with.

I am now trying to get Blender 4.1.1 to GPU compute with HIP, but it says that I do not have a capable card.

For reference, my system specs:

# System Details Report
---

## Report details
- **Date generated:**                              2024-06-20 19:54:25

## Hardware Information:
- **Hardware Model:**                              ASUS PRIME B650-PLUS
- **Memory:**                                      32.0 GiB
- **Processor:**                                   AMD Ryzen™ 7 7800X3D × 16
- **Graphics:**                                    AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XT
- **Disk Capacity:**                               2.0 TB

## Software Information:
- **Firmware Version:**                            2214
- **OS Name:**                                     openSUSE Tumbleweed-Slowroll
- **OS Build:**                                    (null)
- **OS Type:**                                     64-bit
- **GNOME Version:**                               46
- **Windowing System:**                            Wayland
- **Kernel Version:**                              Linux 6.9.5-1-default

I know my system is capable, because I have been using blender just fine on Tumbleweed.

I have searched online, attempting to solve this before turning here - consulting the sacred texts and all - but I have been unable to find info that was relevant to the AMD 7900 XT. Everything I came accross was either Nvidia-centric, or woefully out of date.

I do not know what I do not know regarding repo & package management. Just earlier today I downloaded a package from the open build service and somehow wiped out every icon on my system. I just reinstalled the OS again. I am simply afraid to experiment too much following guides I am not confident about.

I would like to avoid adding tumbleweed or Pakman repo’s if possible. Want to simplify moving parts until I get used to non-ubuntu distros.

If a direct, step by step guide is too much, could somebody please link me to a relevant resource that is confidently suited for my particular needs here?

Thanks in advance

[OrangePulse]

Hi all! Just adding an update so I can mark the thread as closed and maybe help somebody else if they run into this issue.

First: I was mistaken. The problem is not unique to slowroll. It just so happens that I, somehow, accidentally solved it on Tumbleweed without realizing it.

After I slept off the frustration that my original post came from, I started to take things from the top.

Couldn’t find much distro-specific advice, so I started searching for drivers. Realized I was missing a very critical package called “ROCm”, which, from my understanding, is an extra firmware stack that enables some professional applications. Apparently the default mesa drivers are very good with most things, but aren’t able to do much at all with HIP.

I followed this guide on AMD’s website, following the instructions for SUSE Enterprise Linux Systems.

Upon updating I found the AMDGPU repo wasn’t working right, but I assumed it to be redundant with the usual openSUSE packages, so I just deleted it.

Once I finished with that I tried blender again.

This time it was able to recognize that I had HIP capable graphics cards in my system, but any time I tried to render, the viewport would go dark, and I would receive an error message: “Failed to execute compilation command, see console for details.”

The system log output was not helpful, but in my search I found an article on the openSUSE wiki regarding AMD General-purpose computing on graphics processing units. It had some good info about ROCm, but the most important thing I got from it was This specific information regarding blender.

One of the first things it suggested was to “Download archive from blender.org, extract, and use it as a portable install.”

I did as much. Downloaded the latest version of blender [v4.1.1 as of writing this] for linux and extracted it to a folder I labeled as .blender in my home directory. Then I copied the blender.desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications and altered it so that the Exec= and Icon= paths referenced the locations I put them in.

(Side note, if anybody could tell me how I could make the blender.desktop Icon filepath always point to whatever active theme I’m using, that would be a tremendous help.)

Benchmarked it, and it seems to be doing just fine.

Though admittedly under-powered when compared directly to the median benchmarks for my card listed on Blender’s open data benchmark lists. The score is just between an nvidia 4060 & 3070. Certainly frustrating, considering the price.

But I trust we will see the benchmark score work its way up to the true median as the firmware continues to improve. For the moment, I am simply happy I am able to jump back into blender again.

If anybody has any tips and tricks to get more performance out of my rig, please feel free to say so. Otherwise, I am marking this thread as solved.