As you can tell from my previous posts, I do not like NVIDIA. That is because I had a lot of issues with the drivers in the past. Also, recently the card started producing black flashes (see this post). So I finally made the switch to an AMD graphics card.

The setup was rather smooth. OpenSUSE has two options for open source drivers for AMD cards and I chose the Radeon driver. The linked page lists a few commands that have to be run. Only three of the commands were applicable for me.

init 3
modprobe radeon
reboot

I ran all of them without encountering errors and rebooted.

But then I was greeted with this tty screen

My first instinct was to remove the installed NVIDIA drivers (zypper rm nvidia-compute-G06) and remove the NVIDIA-specific options from the GRUB configuration. But this did not resolve my issue. After a few hours of hunting down my mistake I finally realized that reconfiguring Xorg might solve my issue, which it luckily did.

Since the config was fresh I did need to add the infamous “TearFree” option (see this wiki entry). After this slight hiccup, I was all set. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy.

Or so I thought...

Rendering Problems

A few weeks later I wanted to render a video and I hit my first real problem with the AMD drivers. My plan was to put animated snowflakes over a photograph for a music mix I was planning. First, I followed a tutorial that made very simple snowflakes and render times were alright. But in the video, the snowflakes were just hexagons.

hexagon snowflakes

I wanted better snowflakes tho. So I looked for another tutorial and found a great one. The resulting snowflakes are round and have a lot of detail to them.

high definition snowflakes

GPU vs CPU Rendering

The only problem is that he uses a non-standard render engine called “Cycles”. This render engine takes a lot longer than the standard render engine. On my PC, each frame now took almost 3 seconds instead of 0.4 as with the hexagon shaped snowflakes. With about 20,000 frames to render, this was not sustainable.

One way to speed up the render is to render on the GPU instead of the CPU. But this option was greyed out for me… Turns out the Radeon driver does not support HIP, which is needed for rendering with cycles on the AMD card.

Time to search the interwebs for information on HIP…

Trying to Install HIP

At first, my Google-Fu failed me. But then I stumbled across this Reddit post where a user in the comments proposed a solution to my problem. I followed the steps, which I had to adjust a little because of the age of the post and comments. It didn’t work, so I wrote a comment asking for help after trying different things myself.

During this conversation I learned about opi for the first time. It stands for OBS Package Installer, where OBS does not stand for Open Broadcast Service, but Open Build Service. The Open Build Service allows users to host community packages for openSUSE online. Previously, I added the repositories manually to install such packages, but this tool automates this process completely. You just type in the program you want to install, opi will list all repositories that provide this software and installs the repository and the software after selecting the repository you want to use.

I used it to install 2 missing libraries:

  • libffi_7
  • libpython3_6m1

Now, HIP did install successfully. But I still could not select it in blender…

I went ahead and tried installing different packages that were provided by AMD in the same repository but not included in the instructions in the comments of the Reddit post, such as

  • hip-amd-runtime
  • hipsparselt, hipsparselt-devel
  • every asan version of already installed hip related packages

Nothing seemed to work. In the meantime I was also chatting with the legend that provided the steps thus far. He suggested that I run rocminfo and have a look at the output.

ROCk module is loaded
Unable to open /dev/kfd read-write: Permission denied
fabi is not member of "render" group, the default DRM access group.
Users must be a member of the "render" group or another DRM access group
in order for ROCm applications to run successfully.

So in the end, the solution was to add myself to the render group… After a quick sudo usermod -aG render fabi, ROCm was finally up and running. But blender still did not allow me to select HIP for GPU rendering :( At this point I gave up on HIP.

Thinking Outside the Box

I still wanted to finish the music mix tho. Then I had an idea. I still have the NVIDIA graphics card and I have a server lying around in my apartment. So I put the card into the server and booted it up. The server is running Ubuntu Server in headless mode, so I first had to install a desktop environment. I went with GNOME, since it is usually shipped with Ubuntu. Then I also installed the NVIDIA drivers.

Now, only two things were missing:

  • Blender
  • My project files So I quickly installed blender, and then I used SSH to copy my project files onto the server.

Finally, it was time to render the beautiful snow animation. I fired up blender, opened my project and made sure, I had GPU rendering enabeled for the Cycles engine. But to my horror, the render now took

6 seconds per frame!!!

In hindsight, it was perhaps still rendering on CPU and since the CPU in my server is not as powerful as the one in my PC, it was taking a lot longer.

Giving up

Now I was ready to give up the fancy snowflakes. I thought about reverting my project to use polygons as snowflakes. But then I had an idea…

What happens if I try to render the fancy snowflakes with EEVEE? It turns out its possible, and the snowflakes don’t look that bad. See the pic below.

final snowflakes

So I went with this style for my first music mix. It still took a few hours to render. I figured out how to render blender projects from the CLI and ran it on my server through SSH. This way, my only monitor can stay connected to my PC and I don’t have to move it all the time.

You can check out the full mix below.