GPU rendering in Blender with ROCm HIP on Linux

To enjoy the Blender rendering accelerated by an AMD GPU we have to use ROCm. Unfortunately few distributions are officially supported by ROCm, only Ubuntu is on the consumer side. A good practice is therefore to create an Ubuntu container using Distrobox and Podman, install the ROCm part that interests us and launch Blender with this container.

The point being that ROCm sometimes breaks the retro-compatibility and that we can keep using the latest working version with Blender for as long as needed. If you use others programs using ROCm − like IA −, it allows to have multiple different ROCm versions in parallel, each adapted to each program. And also to switch from one container to another to test the newer ROCm versions, so as to rollback quickly if needed.

Add the user to the groups video and render

The execution of ROCm requires the use to be in the video and render groups. We start by create the groups before adding our user:

sudo groupadd video
sudo groupadd render
sudo usermod -aG video,render $LOGNAME

It will be necessary to disconnect the user or reboot the computer for it to takes effect.

Creating the Ubuntu container

Creation of an Ubuntu 24.04 container named "rocm63": distrobox create -i ubuntu:24:04 -n rocm63

We then enter into the newly created container: distrobox enter rocm63

We then update Ubuntu and we install some dependencies:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install build-essential libsm6

Adding the official AMD ROCm repo

We add the repo PGP key: wget https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/rocm.gpg.key -O - | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/rocm.gpg > /dev/null

We add the repo to APT:

echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/rocm.gpg] https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/6.3.1 noble main" \
    | sudo tee --append /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list
echo -e 'Package: *\nPin: release o=repo.radeon.com\nPin-Priority: 600' \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/rocm-pin-600

Installation of HIP

HIP is the ROCm part required by Blender for the GPU rendering. It's an interface that convert the CUDA instruction to code supported by ROCm.

We start by updating the repos sudo apt update then we install HIP sudo apt install hip-runtime-amd

Launch Blender by the container

On the command line it comes down to distrobox enter rocm63 -- /path/to/blender

Via a file blender-rocm63.desktop duplicated from the original, this will require to modify these few lines:

[Desktop Entry] 
Name=Blender (HIP 6.3) 
[...] 
Exec=distrobox enter rocm63 -- ./blender 
Path=/path/to/blender/ 
TryExec=distrobox

It's advised to download Blender from the official website as to easily have different versions in parallel and create a symbolic link blender to the desired version directory as to no have to modify the .desktop file on every Blender update.

Enable HIP in Blender

In Preferences/System/HIP tab check the GPU. Then in the Render Properties of the scene, after having choose the Cycles engine, select under as Device the option GPU Compute. Enjoy the speed ! 👌