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Applications and Porting / Discussion about Blender Cycles on PPC64
« on: February 25, 2026, 07:15:30 pm »
I was sitting down with a friend of mine who was a professional 3D modeler. By observing him working with Blender on my Blackbird workstation for a simple modeling job of a snow man, I realize the biggest blocker that push Blender to the finish line is the lacking of GPU acceleration rendering, specifically the Blender Cycles engine.
As you might have known that AMD ROCm is huge and complex so I rule out any possibility of AMD ever support PPC64. Other engines like CUDA is out of question because NVIDIA does not even offer driver for PPC64. The same goes with Intel unfortunately. The only option is OpenCL which is vendor-neutral but sadly its non-CUDA closeness design and buggy implementation forced Blender team to drop OpenCL few years ago.
What are options out there? LuxCoreRender is one potential solution because it supports OpenCL. In theory we could achieve it like this: LuxCoreRender → OpenCL API → RustiCL (Mesa) → radeonsi (Gallium) → amdgpu (kernel) → AMD GPU. I am unsure how reliable RustiCL is so this approach might be not working at all. However let's assume that it may work, there is still a huge effort to get LuxCore running on PPC64.
I am wondering if any community member has attempted to tackle this blocker issue before.
As you might have known that AMD ROCm is huge and complex so I rule out any possibility of AMD ever support PPC64. Other engines like CUDA is out of question because NVIDIA does not even offer driver for PPC64. The same goes with Intel unfortunately. The only option is OpenCL which is vendor-neutral but sadly its non-CUDA closeness design and buggy implementation forced Blender team to drop OpenCL few years ago.
What are options out there? LuxCoreRender is one potential solution because it supports OpenCL. In theory we could achieve it like this: LuxCoreRender → OpenCL API → RustiCL (Mesa) → radeonsi (Gallium) → amdgpu (kernel) → AMD GPU. I am unsure how reliable RustiCL is so this approach might be not working at all. However let's assume that it may work, there is still a huge effort to get LuxCore running on PPC64.
I am wondering if any community member has attempted to tackle this blocker issue before.
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Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] UT99, UTGOLD, UT2004 on native PPC64LE!
« on: February 24, 2026, 02:28:54 am »Ive asked them before they wouldnt do it
Let's hope they will accept the hardware offer from Tim.
For now we could always play the game with box64
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Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Adding support for POWER SIMD in ispc lib
« on: February 23, 2026, 07:26:18 pm »
The foundation is laid. Community now can have a go with adding more features
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Applications and Porting / [GAMES] UT99, UTGOLD, UT2004 on native PPC64LE!
« on: February 23, 2026, 03:16:47 am »
Okay you click and get baited to read this post.
Well you might have heard that OldUnreal community has entered into an agreement with Epic Games to continue the support for these 3 UT games. That means they have gained access to the engine source codes.
I am trying my best to convince the team to add support for PPC64LE at https://github.com/OldUnreal/UT2004Patches/issues/316
I would really appreciate if more of us POWER-users could chime into the ticket to express our interests
Well you might have heard that OldUnreal community has entered into an agreement with Epic Games to continue the support for these 3 UT games. That means they have gained access to the engine source codes.
I am trying my best to convince the team to add support for PPC64LE at https://github.com/OldUnreal/UT2004Patches/issues/316
I would really appreciate if more of us POWER-users could chime into the ticket to express our interests
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Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Adding support for POWER SIMD in ispc lib
« on: February 19, 2026, 11:02:51 pm »I'll do my best, though I'm currently in a semi-permanent away job, so I'm not on my POWER9 much for sustained periods (part of why there hasn't been much Talospace content either). Job market isn't so great in my line of work these days.
Family and wellbeing first. If you need anything that I could assist, please do not hesitate to reach out to me
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Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Adding support for POWER SIMD in ispc lib
« on: February 14, 2026, 05:02:58 pm »
I have added https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Porting/ispc but the unsure how to add that link to https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Category:Ports
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Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Doom 3 BFG bad ass game XD
« on: February 13, 2026, 06:01:22 pm »
Can anyone help review my PRs?
https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/pull/1073
https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/pull/1077
Many thanks
https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/pull/1073
https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/pull/1077
Many thanks
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Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake 3 source port with Vulkan renderer (vkQuake3)
« on: February 13, 2026, 05:05:17 pm »
It's pretty much straight-forward changes. I would really appreciate if PPC guru members could review and chime in the PR because I know the core team of ioquake3 might not be well versed in PPC so they might be hesitated in merging the changes.
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Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Adding support for POWER SIMD in ispc lib
« on: February 13, 2026, 05:04:11 pm »
It's nearly there! I hope today I could get the PR polished for merger.
@ClassicHasClass I would really appreciate if I could get your guidance and support as I start adding more PPC-specific features into ispc. Great thanks in advance
@ClassicHasClass I would really appreciate if I could get your guidance and support as I start adding more PPC-specific features into ispc. Great thanks in advance
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Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake 3 source port with Vulkan renderer (vkQuake3)
« on: February 09, 2026, 05:46:33 am »
https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/pull/860 for supporting LE
@ClassicHasClass @power9mm could you please help review the PR for me? Many thanks
@ClassicHasClass @power9mm could you please help review the PR for me? Many thanks
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Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Doom 3 BFG bad ass game XD
« on: February 08, 2026, 05:54:50 pm »Thanks, that indeed fixes the build issue for me. But I'm still getting the same runtime issue as before - a segfault after loading the first level.
Please run the game with gdb and paste the stacktrace to gist.github.com or pastebin and share the link here
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Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Adding support for POWER SIMD in ispc lib
« on: February 06, 2026, 11:02:21 pm »
Okay I added a basic support PPC64LE
It's pretty much straight forward changes https://github.com/ispc/ispc/pull/3735
at this stage it has no PPC-specific ISPCTarget enum values, no ISA enum entry, no .ll builtin files. I hope this would create the foundation for developers to further extend it.
It's pretty much straight forward changes https://github.com/ispc/ispc/pull/3735
at this stage it has no PPC-specific ISPCTarget enum values, no ISA enum entry, no .ll builtin files. I hope this would create the foundation for developers to further extend it.
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Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.18
« on: February 05, 2026, 05:56:16 am »
Well it is not news anymore however this kernel has been quite stable on Fedora.
Full changelog could be found at https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_6.18
Full changelog could be found at https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_6.18
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Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Doom 3 BFG bad ass game XD
« on: February 04, 2026, 06:33:34 am »I built dxc and it seems to be recognized by RBDOOM, but I'm getting a build error:
[ FAIL ] SPIRV builtin/lighting/interactionSM.vs.hlsl {main} {USE_GPU_SKINNING=1 LIGHT_POINT=1 LIGHT_PARALLEL=0 USE_PBR=1 USE_NORMAL_FMT_RGB8=1 USE_SHADOW_ATLAS=1}
I did not run into such issue,
```
# build dxc
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler.git
cd DirectXShaderCompiler
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -C ../cmake/caches/PredefinedParams.cmake
make dxc -j
sudo make install-dxc
# build the shared library
make dxcompiler -j32
# install it
sudo make install-dxcompiler
# then update the library cache:
sudo ldconfig
# build game
git clone https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG.git
cd ./RBDOOM-3-BFG/
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build && cd build
export DXC_CUSTOM_PATH=/usr/local/bin/dxc
../neo/cmake-linux-debug.sh
cd ../build
make -j32
```
