AMD Adrenalin 26.5.1 breaks Blender Cycles HIP rendering, Blender 5.2 fix planned
I received a tip to Blender forums discussing a bug with recent AMD drivers. Right off the bat it seems that the issue is not exactly caused by the Radeon driver itself, but it definitely contributed to the issue. The new driver has no ROCm6 runtime causing many issues for users. The driver switched to the newer ROCm 7 runtime.
Blender users with AMD Radeon GPUs are reporting crashes, broken GPU denoising, and missing HIP devices after installing AMD Software Adrenalin 26.5.1. The issue affects Cycles, Blender’s path tracing renderer, when AMD GPU acceleration is enabled.
According to the Blender bug report, Adrenalin 26.5.1 no longer ships the ROCm 6 runtime used by current Cycles builds. Blender developers currently recommend rolling back to AMD driver 26.3.1 or older.
Source: Blender Forums
Sahar A. Kashi, an AMD developer involved with Blender Cycles, HIP, ROCm, HIP-RT, and OIDN work, confirmed the issue is caused by a ROCm runtime mismatch. He explained that a factory reset driver installation can remove “amdhip64_6.dll”, forcing Cycles to load ROCm 7 while its kernels were compiled with the ROCm 6 compiler.
The fix is expected on the Blender side, with Blender 5.2 planned to move Cycles to the ROCm 7 runtime. Until then, affected users should install AMD driver 26.3.1 or older.
Source: Blender
