AMD joins as main sponsor for Blender
AMD is starting to sponsor the free 3D graphics suite Blender as main sponsor. Blender now almost reached the goal of paying a total of 20 full-time developers. In the future, AMD will contribute directly as a so-called patron for the financing of Blender. This corresponds to an annual amount of at least 120,000 euros and thus two jobs for full-time developers.
That makes Blender financing now fully supported, by three patron sponsors including NVIDIA as well. In addition to AMD include the aforementioned Nvidia and the game manufacturer Epic Games reports, Golem
The Blender community has also attracted many more sponsors this year, including Ubisoft, Swedish game studio Embark, and sporting goods manufacturer Adidas. The latter obviously uses Blender for visualization. According to Blender's announcement, the AMD donation will help the team focus on general software development, improve support for AMD technology in Blender, and invest in a volcanic migration. The work on it will probably take some time. According to the current overview of financing by Blender , the non-profit Blender Foundation currently has a monthly income of around € 94,000. Next goal of the organization are 100,000 euros, which among other things 20 developers are to be paid, which drive the development of the free software. In addition, Blender's work is supported by the Blender Institute, which,
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Joined: 2007-05-31
Sure, but it help one of the major tool to "optimise" AMD's production for Blender.
As Blender is one of the best tool to learn, to get if no money but talented, to have if you are a pro but need something cool that your company's expensive tool have issue to do it easely... (you can add lot lot lot more reasons to use Blender): so it is a good move to improve how consumer see AMD.
It follow the recent accort with M$, the line is clear, good point.
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I wouldn't say so. AMD would have gone bankrupt without the console deals a few years ago, and even those weren't any gold mines, just something that allowed them to survive. Supporting Blender is a worthy cause, however, and definitely something they should do if they can afford it. It's a hundred times better than sponsoring Formula 1, or something. At the end of the day, although their CPU department is now in good shape for the time being, their GPU side is lagging behind and would need all the resources it can get. So, I wouldn't say AMD has chests full of loose money like Intel, which could build a manned base on Mars if they want to, with all the money they have got.
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I'm quite sure AMD wouldn't have bothered if Nvidia didn't do the same thing a couple weeks ago.
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I feel AMD is falling behind in this matter.
Quite recently, Blender added support for Nvidia Optix, besides the already existing CUDA. And even before that performance on AMD GPU's was slower (OpenCL vs CUDA). Now the opportunity for AMD is .. that Vulcan gets support (since Apple's Metal API won't be added to Blender due to license issues) .. for which there is demand in the Blender community, and interest among devs. But merely giving money is not the answer imho. They need to commit a few specialist that can work with core blender devs to work out the low-level stuff.
AMD does have a renderer of its own with Blender supported which is called AMD ProRender. But the adoption of that is pretty low.
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120,000 a year? Nice, but sure that's loose change for AMD isn't it.