I would like to use blender with gpu acceleration, but the Ubuntu 18 packages are fairly out of date. I’ve got part way through the process but I keep hitting numerous issues. Has anyone done this before, and if so do you have any tips? Thanks!
I have not tried this, but do find it interesting. One thing to note about Blender though is that it uses PCIe functions to detect a GPU (a discrete dGPU). Jetsons have a GPU which is directly integrated with the memory controller though (an integrated iGPU), and thus there is no PCIe function available for detect. My thought is that if you can compile Blender, but not select GPU, then you would be at a point where you could modify the Blender source to force use of the iGPU. You would have to cut out any kind of PCI detection function.
I’ve briefly installed Ubuntu 20 on it and got blender 2.92 running and it detects “Xavier” as a cuda compute device. It was pretty fast but the experimental cycles-x engine claims to achieve up to 7x performance improvement on cuda devices. That could almost push it past the performance of my laptop on cpu.
Unfortunately due to compatibility issues I’ve had to downgrade back to Ubuntu 18, but I’m fairly certain if I can compile it from source it should work.
Also are you sure it isn’t just on windows that it uses pcie to detect the graphics? I’ve prodded around at the kernel source on my Mac a bit and it looks like on Unix it operates closer to driver level. Not positive though.
I’m going to try and recompile it again. Perhaps if you don’t mind I can send you the error message where it hangs and you could take a look?
I’m pretty sure that Blender has no ability to detect a GPU which can’t be detected with nvidia-smi. One would have to write a substitute detect function, and that function would have to be coded specifically for a Jetson…which I am rather sure is not in Blender mainline code.
Go ahead and post any compile errors here. I don’t know if I can help, but it won’t hurt to look. Other people would also see this.
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