AMD Radeon 26.5.1 driver breaks Blender Cycles – Fix incoming
AMD Software 26.5.1 breaks Blender Cycles, but a fix is incoming
AMD released its AMD Software 26.5.1 Radeon GPU drivers last week, and they are causing mayhem amongst Blender users. Blender users have reported a number of issues, including crashes, non-functional denoising, and broken HIP support.
These bugs are caused by AMD’s move to ROCm 7 with its newest drivers. AMD’s newest drivers remove AMD’s older ROCm 6 runtime. Currently, Blender does not support AMD’s ROCm 7 runtime, though this will change with Blender version 5.2.
For now, it is recommended that Blender users install AMD’s 26.3.1 (or older) drivers. Once Blender 5.2 is released, these bugs should be addressed. Below is Blender’s official recommendations on how to handle this issue.
GPU driver 26.5.1 removed the ROCm 6 runtime, which various parts of Cycles use or rely on.
This issue is planned to be fixed in Blender 5.2 by switching to the ROCm 7 runtime. Until then, users are recommended to downgrade to GPU driver 25.3.1 or older.
- Find your GPU on https://www.amd.com/en/support/download/drivers.html
- Select the
Previous Versionsbutton- Find 26.3.1 or older, download, and install it
The good news is that this issue should be addressed with the release of Blender 5.2. Until then, AMD users should use older AMD GPU drivers with Blender. While this is not an ideal solution, it will allow Blender users to complete their work using Radeon graphics cards.
Currently, Blender 5.2 doesn’t have a defined release date. However, it is currently undergoing alpha testing and is due to be released sometime over the next few months.
You can join the discussion on AMD’s latest GPU drivers causing Blender issues on the OC3D Forums.
