In a recent announcement, AMD engineers revealed that they are working on an update to HIP-RT for Blender developers, just before the much-anticipated release of Blender 5.0. This update aims to optimize ray tracing performance on RDNA4 GPUs.
HIP-RT Update Details
On September 4, 2025, a pull request was submitted for Blender's Cycles engine, which includes the recent release of the HIP RT 3.0 code. This new code brings a host of innovative features for ray tracing on RDNA4, including support for:
- Compressed BVH8 and triangle packs.
- Intersecting instances.
- Oriented bounding boxes.
In addition to these functionalities, other aspects of the code have been improved.
The updated HIP-RT code for Blender 5.0 incorporates the new features of Navi 4 (RDNA4), although it is important to note that this requires the use of HIP SDK 6.4 or higher on Windows, or ROCm 7.0 or higher on Linux. If you are running an earlier version of the ROCm/HIP code, HIP-RT will revert to the old code, which could lead to a performance loss of 15 to 20%.
Key Improvements
The HIP-RT update introduces several significant enhancements, such as:
- Support for Navi4 ray tracing features, which require specific versions of the SDKs.
- Embedding kernel compression in the hiprt library with a size reduction of approximately ten times.
- Fix in the handling of the embedded Balanced BVH kernel.
These improvements are quite encouraging and are expected to contribute to notable performance gains in the new Blender release.
Blender 5.0 Release Timeline
Blender 5.0 is currently in its alpha phase, with a planned release for early October 2025. With about a month remaining to integrate new features, it is anticipated that the new HIP-RT code will arrive in time to be part of this update.
The beta phase of Blender 5.0, focused on bug fixes, will start in October. The Blender 5.0 release candidate is expected to be published around November 5, and the stable version is anticipated to be released on November 11.
On another note, in this week’s rendering and cycles meeting, both the review of the HIP-RT update and the update of Intel libraries for Intel oneAPI ray tracing support were discussed. However, it was mentioned that support for the updated libraries will only be available on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later versions, which will impact the ability to render oneAPI GPU on older versions of Linux.
Conclusions
The introduction of the HIP-RT update for Blender 5.0 underscores AMD's commitment to enhancing ray tracing performance on its latest generation of RDNA4 GPUs. These improvements promise to not only increase the effectiveness of Blender as a creation tool but also benefit the entire community of users who rely on this powerful platform. For enthusiasts of open-source software and digital creation, the wait for Blender 5.0 is justified with the exciting updates that are on the way.
For more information on Blender development and related news, continue exploring the articles on this blog.
