> Support for hardware ray-tracing acceleration has been added for AMD and Intel graphics cards.
Added experimental support for AMD hardware ray-tracing acceleration, using HIP RT. This improves performance on RX 6000, RX 7000, W6000, and W7000 series GPUs.
Known limitations:
Windows only, as HIP RT doesn’t support Linux yet.
Degenerate triangles may causes crashes or poor performance.
Shadows in hair are not rendering accurately.
> Windows only, as HIP RT doesn’t support Linux yet
Blender 3 taking so much time to give AMD Linux users hardware acceleration back makes me sad. I guess it's not misguided though, they got a lot of attention from the industry in recent years, and that's where funding comes from, so naturally they will focus on supporting the major use cases (i.e. Windows and Nvidia) and improving features. Though I do love the new and improved features, UV packing, for instance, was a longtime pet peeve of mine while using Blender compared to other (closed-source) modeling packages.
>because of better Linux support
In my experience nvidia has better Linux support. Just look at how many projects are using Linux and cuda and don't support AMD.
AMD has much better open source drivers. nvidia gives you a binary blob... but it works better.
That's out of date, I believe. Nvidia went open source last year, though they did that by moving a lot of code from the drivers over to their firmware (in binary blob form).
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...
From the repo readme[1], "GeForce and Workstation support is still considered alpha-quality."