I was wondering if there now (as of Blender 2.78c) a way to use GPU rendering on an Intel Iris Pro Graphics Card. I tried to get it to work, and successfully got the GPU to show up in the System User preferences, and in the render tab, but when I try to actually render something, the message at the top says LOADING RENDER KERNELS (MAY TAKE A FEW MINUTES THE FIRST TIME). However, it seems to take more than a few minutes. This message never goes away and I need to force quit blender to stop it. Any way to properly do it?
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2$\begingroup$ Possible duplicate of Is it possible to do OpenCL rendering on Intel processors? $\endgroup$– Duarte Farrajota Ramos ♦Commented May 26, 2017 at 4:42
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$\begingroup$ try using eGPU.. I bought one from akitio 2 - Last year from ebay, the I had macbook pro early 11.(not supported with that). Now I own MBP 15-15.. but not tested eGPU yet. I' hope it will work great! $\endgroup$– MFarooqiCommented Aug 10, 2019 at 9:21
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3 Answers
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As of 2.78 GPU rendering is only supported under certain NVidia graphics cards that support the correct CUDA version.
Starting with 2.79, GPU rendering will introduce support for AMD graphics cards through OpenCL on feature par with CUDA, since basic support was available since 2.75 (thanks to a bunch of patches contributed by AMD itself).
Under Intel it is considered an experimental feature, and as far as I know, is too slow and offers no benefit over regular CPU rendering. You can enable it by setting a global variable with command line but don't expect it to preform acceptably, not even to work reliably at any point.
answered May 26, 2017 at 4:40
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I just downloaded the blender source, and in intern/cycles/device/opencl/opencl_util.cpp, I found this. It appears Intel Iris is specifically not supported.
bool OpenCLInfo::device_supported(const string& platform_name,
const cl_device_id device_id)
{
...
/* It is possible tyo have Iris GPU on AMD/Apple OpenCL framework
* (aka, it will not be on Intel framework). This isn\'t supported
* and needs an explicit blacklist.
*/
if(strstr(device_name.c_str(), "Iris")) {
return false;
}
...
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According to the documentation, Blender requires your graphics card to support CUDA or OpenCL. Most Apple devices have an AMD GPU, thus OpenCL.
For future reference, here's a list of Apple computers that support GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units):
