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I have a laptop with old gcn 1 amd gpu

on windows, it says Radeon R5 M330, it's not R5, just a rebranded ATI card

on linux,

$ sudo lspci -v
01:00.0 Display controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Sun XT [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8690M / R5 M330 / M430 / R7 M520] (rev 83)

basically, a hainan card

these penny pinchers at hp have given me a "mobile" card rebranded more than 6 times !!! , they also did this with the wifi card btw, I mean yeah what should I expect at this price ?

so, my question is can I use this card with blender (for cycles rendering)? I know blender has dropped support for old cards, but I think there is still some alt render engine that supports this card, or perhaps an old version of blender ...

any help is appreciated...

sys info,

i3-duo (latest drivers with support from blender)
6gb ram

windows:

win 10 pro licenced
intel 520 hd integrated gpu (latest drivers with support from blender)
amd r5 m330 dedicated gpu (latest adrenalin drivers, ? from blender)

linux:

zorin 15.2 ultimate
intel 520 hd integrated gpu (old drivers, got it running after some fiddling)
amd hainan dedicated gpu (amdgpu, ? from blender)
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I have the same GPU, and older versions of Blender support it. I think 2.78 was the last version to support this GPU generation. I don't know if there is some way to make new versions work with it.

Edit: Yes, 2.78 is the last version to support GCN 1.0 GPUs for Cycles rendering. From the 2.79 release notes:

Due to various issues with drivers for AMD GCN 1.0 architecture, those cards are no longer supported for Cycles rendering

You might not see a big improvement over rendering with your CPU though; this GPU isn't that powerful after all. I made a quick comparison between my CPU and GPU:

  • CPU (i5-6200U) took 8:13.03 with 4 threads rendering 48x48 blocks each
  • GPU took 9:53.98 with 512x512 blocks, which actually got split up into two 256x512 blocks by Blender because of some GPU memory limitation

You might get better results compared to your CPU, but just don't expect a lot from it.

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