Support of AMD and Apple gpus

  • August 10th, 2026

Today, I have two important announcements about the future of SheepIt.

New hardware requirements

From today, new versions of the SheepIt client will require contributing machines to be capable of running Blender 5.1. As always, SheepIt provides the Blender binaries, so there's nothing for you to install or update yourself.

However, older machines that cannot run Blender 5.1 can still contribute to SheepIt. These machines can not use newer client.
For them, we are providing the last v7 version who is compatible with old hardware.
sheepit-client-7.26132.jar
sheepit-client-7.26132.exe
Do not use the auto-updater only use those files.
While this means that older machines will not have access to the latest SheepIt client features, they can still contribute to the community.

This change is necessary to keep SheepIt compatible with the latest Blender releases and unlock some exciting opportunities.

Which brings me to the second announcement...

AMD and Apple GPU support is back

In 2023, we made the difficult decision to discontinue support for AMD GPUs and focus exclusively on NVIDIA.

At the time, Blender did not always produce identical renders across different GPU vendors. This meant maintaining separate rendering pools, one for NVIDIA and another for AMD. With around 90% of contributors using NVIDIA and only 10% using AMD, the development and maintenance cost simply wasn't sustainable.

Fortunately, things have changed.

Recent Blender versions now produce consistent results across NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple GPUs, allowing us to merge everyone into a single rendering pool.

This means that AMD and Apple GPU rendering are officially back on SheepIt.

A real-world test

Although our own testing has been very encouraging, there's only one way to know if everything works reliably at the scale of SheepIt: let the community use it.

So, consider this a large-scale real-world test.

If we discover significant rendering differences between GPU vendors or encounter reliability issues, we may have to disable cross-vendor rendering again by the end of the year. We sincerely hope that won't be necessary.

We're optimistic that Blender has finally reached the level of consistency needed to make this work.

There is more!
In case you didn't know yet, we also support OpenEXR up to 50 MB and custom color configurations such as ACES.

As always, thank you to everyone who contributes computing power, reports bugs, and helps make SheepIt possible.

Happy rendering!

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