Maxon has announced a collaboration with AMD to deliver GPU rendering in Cinema 4D through ProRender, AMD’s OpenCL CPU/GPU renderer. ProRender is open source, cross-platform, freely available and offers bridge plugins for several 3D applications. More on Maxon’s website.
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Makes sense from a support all plattforms view. Apple has sold only AMD graphics (if any) in their recent product cycles. Are Nvidia GPUs on par when it comes to open Cl with their AMD counterparts?
NVidia still don’t support OpenCL 2.0, and their implementation of OpenCL 1.2 is deliberately kept slower than CUDA. This encourages developers to stick with CUDA just to satisfy the largest audience, and it’s been a successful strategy for NVidia.
Bundling ProRender with C4D is a smart move on AMD’s part. It demonstrates to a large audience that OpenCL is just as performant as CUDA, but hey, it only requires version 1.2, it’s open-source, and it’s not their fault if runs slower on NVidia and faster on AMD.
There’s a healthy jab at Intel in there, too: AMD’s raytracing libraries fall back on Intel’s Embree raytracing library when the GPU isn’t up to the task. That’s like saying “if we have to walk, we can let Intel set the walking pace”.