AMD Radeon 26.5.1 Driver Breaks Blender Cycles Path Tracing

Posted on Edited on
AMD's Adrenalin 26.5.1 WHQL driver is crashing Blender 5.1.1 Cycles due to a ROCm 6 versus ROCm 7 runtime mismatch.

Quick Report

AMD's Adrenalin Edition 26.5.1 WHQL driver is causing crashes in Blender 5.1.1 when users render with Cycles. The issue appears tied to a runtime mismatch, because Blender 5.1.1 expects ROCm 6 while the new driver package ships with ROCm 7.

AMD ecosystem developer Sahar A. Kashi said the problem can surface after a clean install, when the older amdhip64_6.dll is removed and Cycles tries to load ROCm 7 kernels that Blender 5.1.1 cannot use. The current workaround is to roll back to 26.3.1 until Blender 5.2 lands with full ROCm 7 support.

Written using GitHub Copilot GPT-5.4 mini in agentic mode instructed to follow current codebase style and conventions for writing articles.

Source(s)