Run Blender 2.8+ on Arm64 Panfrost

ARM Technical Assistance
1

Did anyone successfully run Blender 2.8+ on Arm64 Manjaro by using Panfrost driver with good performance?

I am unable to run this on Panfrost Driver, it just keep crashing once I opened the Blender 2.8+

However, I noticed that I can run Blender 2.8+ on LLVMPipe Driver.

Thanks for the share everyone.

:slight_smile:

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I found this fix on another forum, but the performance is terrible, almost unusable…

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 blender

source:

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I don’t think panfrost for Gxx is stable to handle blender.
Maybe @Pak0st can advice how well it works on T8xx rk3399.

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Thanks, @spikerguy !

@rna , for Blender 2.8+ the requirement is for geometry shaders. You will notice the following error when you try to run it: maximum output vertices (2) exceeds GL_MAX_GEOMETRY_OUTPUT_VERTICES . As far as I know, this is of low priority for Panfrost and who knows when or if they will be worked on. More info here:
https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/panfrost/2020-09-08#27879475;

Unlike OBS, to use Blender 2.8+ it’s not enough to use the experimental flag for gl3 (the said geometry shaders haven’t been worked on because they are complex and other items are more tantilizing - like supporting Bifrost :slight_smile: ).

Blender is working on Vulkan implementation at least for EEVEE. Unlike the geometry shaders, we know for sure Vulkan will come to Panfrost :wink: When this will happen for both projects - we don’t know for now.

This leaves you only with software rendering for Blender 2.8+ and as you have noticed, the performance is… lacking to say the least.

Actually usable option, is the blender-2.7-es2 package. I haven’t had time to use it in the past few weeks (if it has broken again - do ping me to find a fix) but it worked well for me given the 3D project was simple. As the name suggets, this is Blender 2.79 with OpenGL ES2 used for the viewport instead.

Note:
I should check why this particular version of Blender doesn’t work on the PinePhone (getting black screen) :expressionless: Could be something from the environment or Lima lacking specific functionality though that is outside of the scope you’ve defined with Panfrost.

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@spikerguy Thank You

@Pak0st Thanks for your clear explanation.

This is something interesting to wait, a vulkan driver for Panfrost. That would be super awesome…!

I thought that maybe there is a work around with good performance. Because last time I used blender using LLVMPipe, although the performance is laggy, but I managed to render an image using EEVEE renderer in shader mode quite fast.

Yes, I did and the performance is surprisingly pretty good, but I miss EEVEE

Have you checked my post about installing blender 2.79 via chroot debian buster? Use this method and your blender 2.79 will never break, but I don’t know how to make it using the es2? It is actually a bonus for my step by step on compiling Box86 on Arm64 devices.

Here’s my Box86 topic:

Here’s how to install Blender 2.79 on chroot debian (at the bottom section):

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@rna , it’s just a few flags :slight_smile:
Check the PKGBUILD here: manjaro-arm / packages / community / blender-2.7-es2 · GitLab I would bet that the debian package would have to be compiled though.

After I’ve disabled boost, it looks like we won’t expect breakages for quite some time :smiley: Before it was quite dicey.
The last change to the manjaro package was to resolve Python 3.9 compatibility.

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This is a good news. Many Thanks for this info.

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Hi, I found this PanVK, it is Panfrost Vulkan Driver from Collabora. Please have a look:

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Thanks, @rna , I haven’t had the time to check how far PanVK is and if it will work with the latest versions of Blender.

Not sure if PanVK is available in Mesa yet.

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It’s probably not gonna be included in the default panfrost builds, so it will have it’s own meson build option. So far, it does not.

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Yeah, I’m checking out the branch atm:

Looks like a job for a spare sd card.

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