At the time of its inception, it was quite impressive, though a bit slow and less polished than CUDA.

What Is OpenCL?Įarlier versions of Blender’s flagship render engine Cycles also supported internal rendering using OpenCL (Open Computing Language) framework, an open industry standard C-based GPU programming language that allows compatible devices, either NVIDIA or AMD, to run all kinds of operations, including local rendering. In the past, Blender used this device as an alternative to CPU rendering and though effective, it was designed exclusively for NVIDIA-built GPUs. The platform, built by NVIDIA, uses a language similar to the C-based language used for multipurpose applications, as well as for developing software used in graphic processing, obviously necessary for rendering. What Is CUDA?ĬUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel programming platform released in 2007. However, before getting into that, we should talk a bit about what came before it. With its demise comes a new GPU rendering device built from the ground up for AMD users in HIP. Blender 3.0 released in December 2021 and is still expecting to receive many more improvements in the coming months, but one of the biggest announcements in its development cycle has so far been the deprecation of the OpenCL device for its physically-based ray-tracing (calculations of light behavior simulation) rendering engine Cycles X (originally referred to as Cycles).

Blender and vray