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To enable GPU rendering:
Select eitherCUDA,OptiX,HIP,oneAPI, orMetalin theCycles Render Devices user preference.
Enable the available devices for the chosen backend.
Configure each scene to use theGPU ComputeDevice.
Blender supports different technologies to render on the GPU depending on the particular GPU manufacturerand operating system.
CUDA is supported on Windows and Linux and requires aNVIDIA graphics cards with compute capability 5.0 and higher. To make sure your GPU is supported,see thelist of NVIDIA graphics cardswith the compute capabilities and supported graphics cards.
OptiX is supported on Windows and Linux and requires a NVIDIA graphics cards with compute capability 5.0 and higherand a driver version of at least 535. To make sure your GPU is supported,see thelist of NVIDIA graphics cards.
OptiX takes advantage of hardware ray-tracing acceleration in RTX graphics cards, for improved performance.
GPU acceleration for OpenImageDenoise is available for compute capability 7.0 and higher, which includesall NVIDIA RTX cards.
Supported GPUs include:
Radeon RX 5000 Series
Radeon RX 6000 Series
Radeon RX 7000 Series
Radeon RX 9000 series
Radeon Pro W6000 Series
Radeon Pro W7000 Series
Minimum driver versions:
Windows: Radeon Software 24.9.1 or Radeon PRO Software 24.Q4
Linux: Radeon Software 23.40 or ROCm 6.0
Please refer toAMD’s website for moreinformation about AMD graphics cards and their architectures.
Hardware ray-tracing support is available with the most recent drivers.This can be enabled in the preferences, and is supported on Radeon RX 6000 and newer.
GPU accelerated denoising is available on discrete Radeon RX 6000 and Radeon RX 7000 GPUs.
oneAPI is a computation library that is supported on Windows and Linux and requires aIntel® Arc™ graphics card with the Xe HPG architecture.Hardware acceleration for ray-tracing and denoising is supported.
Supported GPUs include:
Intel® Arc™ A-Series
Intel® Arc™ B-Series
Minimum driver versions:
Windows: Intel Graphics Driver XX.X.101.5518
Linux:intel-level-zero-gpu package 1.3.27642,typically available through theintel-compute-runtime package XX.XX.34666.3
Please refer toIntel’s websitefor more information about Intel graphics cards and their architectures.
GPU accelerated denoising is available on all supported GPUs.
Metal is supported on Apple computers with Apple Silicon.macOS 13.0 or newer is required to support all features.
GPU accelerated denoising is available on Apple Silicon.
Path Guiding is not supported on any GPU.
Open Shading Language is only supported for OptiX, with some limitations listed in the documentation.
On older GPU generations, graphics cards can only either render or draw the user interface.This can make Blender unresponsive while it is rendering.Heavy scenes can also make Blender unresponsive on newer GPUs,when using a lot of memory or executing expensive shaders, however this is generally less of a problem.
The only complete solution for this is to use a dedicated GPU for rendering, and another for display.
There may be multiple causes,but the most common one is that there is not enough memory on your graphics card.Typically, the GPU can only use the amount of memory that is on the GPU(seeWould multiple GPUs increase available memory? for more information).This is usually much smaller than the amount of system memory the CPU can access.With CUDA, OptiX, HIP and Metal devices, if the GPU memory is full Blender will automaticallytry to use system memory. This has a performance impact, but will usually still result in a faster renderthan using CPU rendering.
Yes, go toPreferences ‣ System ‣ Compute Device Panel, and configure it as you desire.
Typically, no, each GPU can only access its own memory.
The exception is NVIDIA GPUs connected with NVLink, where multiple GPUs can share memory at a small performance cost.This can be enabled withDistributed Memory Across Devicesin the preferences.
This varies depending on the hardware used. Different technologies also have different compute timesdepending on the scene tested. For the most up to date information on the performance of different devices,browse theBlender Open Data resource.
In case of problems, be sure to install the official graphics drivers from the GPU manufacturers website,or through the package manager on Linux.The graphics drivers provided by the computer manufacturer can sometimes be outdated or incomplete.
This usually means there is not enough memory to store the scene for use by the GPU.
Note
One way to reduce memory usage is by using smaller resolution textures.For example, 8k, 4k, 2k, and 1k image textures take up respectively 256MB, 64MB, 16MB and 4MB of memory.
If a GPU is used for both display and rendering,Windows has a limit on the time the GPU can do render computations.If you have a particularly heavy scene, Cycles can take up too much GPU time.Reducing Tile Size in the Performance panel may alleviate the issue,but the only real solution is to use separate graphics cards for display and rendering.
Another solution can be to increase the time-out,although this will make the user interface less responsive when rendering heavy scenes.Learn More Here.
On Linux, depending on your GCC version you might get this error.See theNVIDIA CUDA Installation Guide for Linuxfor a list of supported GCC versions. There are two possible solutions to this error:
If you have an older GCC installed that is compatible with the installed CUDA toolkit version,then you can use it instead of the default compiler.This is done by setting theCYCLES_CUDA_EXTRA_CFLAGS environment variable when starting Blender.
Launch Blender from the command line as follows:
CYCLES_CUDA_EXTRA_CFLAGS="-ccbin gcc-x.x"blender
(Substitute the name or path of the compatible GCC compiler).
If the above is unsuccessful, delete the following line in/usr/local/cuda/include/host_config.h:
#error -- unsupported GNU version! gcc x.x and up are not supported!This will allow Cycles to successfully compile the CUDA rendering kernel the first time itattempts to use your GPU for rendering. Once the kernel is built successfully, you canlaunch Blender as you normally would and the CUDA kernel will still be used for rendering.
This error may happen if you have a new NVIDIA graphics card that is not yet supported bythe Blender version and CUDA toolkit you have installed.In this case Blender may try to dynamically build a kernel for your graphics card and fail.
In this case you can:
Check if the latest Blender version(official orexperimental builds)supports your graphics card.
If you build Blender yourself, try to download and install a newer CUDA developer toolkit.
Normally users do not need to install the CUDA toolkit as Blender comes with precompiled kernels.