Blender, will it work on the Steam Deck?

[OrbitalAce]

Blender, will it work on the Steam Deck? I'm thinking no with the 'Nvidia Kernel' lockout. But I just thought I would ask just in case. Although it's Steam OS, which is an Arch Linux variant so it a weird one?

[AC Denton]

If it's important enough to you you can just install Windows on it and use Blender that way. Blender is also open source so I'm sure the community will make sure it works on the Deck anyway, even if not right away at launch.

[The Renderer]

I'm sure it will eventually. Whether it's something you'd actually want to do is a different question, though.

[Cube]

yes

[Leozard]

Originally posted by AC Denton:

If it's important enough to you you can just install Windows on it and use Blender that way. Blender is also open source so I'm sure the community will make sure it works on the Deck anyway, even if not right away at launch.

Blender has linux builds, it should work just fine from steam.

[Saulkar]

This is something I have been musing about for a while. It would be a pretty nice concept to have an addon toggle that simplifies the interface and puts everything into quickly accessible context sensitive pie-menus.

For modeling, using the controller with things like sculpting intensity controlled by how hard you press the triggers; The haptic pads for selection boxes and manipulation while the thumb sticks control either navigation and/or manipulation with a toggle.

Whether this could actually work for 3D modeling in practice is debatable. Animation, rendering, and compositing are a whole'nother kettle-o-fish but I do not think impossible. Just awkward.

As for whether Blender can actually run on it, as the others have said, its open source nature will pretty much ensure this.

[Miles Farber]

I have the steam deck.

Blender does not support HIP despite the steam deck has an RDNA2 GPU which supports HIP. This means either two things:

1) The windows drivers for the steam deck GPU are fake
or
2) The GPU inside the steam deck isn't actually RDNA2

I'm thinking it's the former, since not even Forza Horizon 5 recognizes the steam deck's gpu and refuses to run, but this never happens on Linux. I tried using the "detect" drivers from AMD's official website, and apparently even AMD themselves do not support Steam Deck's gpu, which is extremely suspicious considering that many laptops with RDNA2 graphics already came out and work perfectly.

[Miles Farber]

Using Blender on linux doesn't work because Blender 3.1 currently doesn't work on Arch distros, thanks to the dreadful "This executable has been blocked because it's stored on a network shared drive" error.

[QB00]

Blender for steam deck should support HIP. Seems to be a AMD problem, is there a support email we can use to tell them we want this?

[Miles Farber]

Originally posted by QB00:

Blender for steam deck should support HIP. Seems to be a AMD problem, is there a support email we can use to tell them we want this?

You have to specify which GPU you have, which is impossible since according to them the AMD Custom APU 0405 does not exist. I did manage to get around the FH5 bug by increasing VRAM allocation to 4GB and enabling virtualization.

[GoldPower5]

Just adding my experience here,
Blender does "work", I have used it to follow various tutorials and make some of my own designs. The only thing not working is Cycles GPU rendering. CPU rendering works, but abysmally slow. I have been trying to solve this on my own, with very little success so far.

Disclaimer - I don't really understand what i'm doing, but I feel like I'm making progress

Check out my progress here:

https://github.com/rocm-arch/rocm-arch/issues/944

https://developer.blender.org/T103726

https://discord.com/channels/331718482485837825/1066605311949029377

[Zoio The Green Eye]

How to run Blender on SteamDeck with GPU acceleration!

https://linuxuniverse.com.br/artigo/blender-sd