Hardware acceleration in Blender on AMD

Help
1

I’m on Nixos stable 25.11.

I have an RX 7800 XT.

Based on GPU Rendering - Blender 5.0 Manual Blender should have HIP support on this hardware.

Following AMD GPU - NixOS Wiki I’ve installed the blender-hip package (and blender of course), and I have this in my configuration:

  hardware.graphics = {
    enable = true;
    enable32Bit = true;
  };
  hardware.amdgpu.opencl.enable = true;
  systemd.tmpfiles.rules = [
    "L+    /opt/rocm/hip   -    -    -     -    ${pkgs.rocmPackages.clr}"
  ];

I wasn’t sure whether I needed the tmpfiles stuff but included it.

After all that, in Blender’s system preferences under cycles render devices I expect to see HIP as an option, but I don’t.

Any ideas?

2

So I have a RX 7900xt and blender works on my system with hip. I have only installed the blender-hip package.

Also this is my amd-gpu config I use:

{config,pkgs,lib,inputs,...}:
{
  boot.initrd.kernelModules = [ "amdgpu" ];
  nixpkgs.config.rocmSupport = true;

  hardware.graphics = {
    enable = true;
    enable32Bit = true;
    extraPackages = [ pkgs.rocmPackages.clr.icd ];
  };
  hardware.amdgpu.opencl.enable = true;
  services.xserver.videoDrivers = ["amdgpu"];

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    lact
    rocmPackages.rocminfo
    clinfo
    rocmPackages.clr.icd
  ];

  systemd.tmpfiles.rules = [
    "L+    /opt/rocm   -    -    -     -    ${pkgs.rocmPackages.clr}"
  ];

  systemd.services.lact = {
    description = "AMDGPU Control Daemon";
    after = ["multi-user.target"];
    wantedBy = ["multi-user.target"];
    serviceConfig = {
      ExecStart = "${pkgs.lact}/bin/lact daemon";
    };
    enable = true;
  };
}

The systemd lact service is not needed, only if you want to overclock your gpu.

Maybe try this config to see if HIP works with this in Blender.

3

Unfortunately no luck. I added all missing pieces of the above, built/switched, and restarted, but still no HIP option.

Just in case I’m being an idiot, I’m expecting a “HIP” option alongside “none” and “CUDA” here, right?

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4

Oh! I read your message again, specifically “I have only installed the blender-hip package” and so I tried removing blender to just leave blender-hip, and now the option appears!

1 Like
5

does anyone know if the tmpfiles rule is still needed?

6

I included it, don’t remember whether I tried without.