which driver i should install for Standard NP20s to run blender on vm and its showing me open gl 4.3 is required

Question

i have tried to install nvidia and amd drivers but its not installing and showing some errors , if someone could guide to install install the correct drivers for np series in order to run blender it would be great

Answer 1

Hello, @Thirumurugan Arivazhagan !

What drivers should I use with NP-series VMs?

The NP-series virtual machines are powered by Xilinx U250 FPGAs which uses the XOCL driver. This would explain why the NVIDIA and AMD drivers aren't working. I would recommend using a GPU accelerated VM family, like the NV-series and NVv3-series sizes which are the same VMs recommended for use with Maya. Still, it may be easier to use a different service for common tasks like cloud rendering. I've included some additional information below including some options specifically for Blender.

How do I run Blender on an Azure VM?

The simplest approach for the common task of cloud rendering is to use Azure Batch, which supports a variety of 3D software platforms including Blender as well as Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya.

You can find instructions for rendering using Azure in this series of documents:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/batch/batch-rendering-service

For additional information, you can check out this blog.

Virtual Machines will require some configuration which can be mitigated in part by using an image from the Azure Marketplace. These are two options that you may be interested in (although we should note that these are third party offerings):

• Blender 3D On Windows Server 2019 (5.0 rating with 20 reviews)
• Blender Cloud Rendering (SaaS)

For full control of your VM, you can create something from the GPU family. I would recommend using the NV-series and NVv3-series sizes as mentioned above which are optimized and designed for remote visualization, streaming, gaming, encoding, and VDI scenarios using frameworks such as OpenGL and DirectX. These are the same VMs recommended for use with Maya.

My personal recommendation is to use the NVIDIA GPU Driver Extension which installs appropriate NVIDIA CUDA or GRID drivers on an N-series VM. Drivers themselves are a lengthy subject if you decide to install them manually:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/n-series-driver-setup

Lastly, some people have used an earlier version of Blender with more lenient driver requirements. Depending on your needs, this could bypass some of the issues encountered in configuring and selecting your VM.

---

I hope this has been helpful! Your feedback is important so please take a moment to accept answers.

If you still have questions, please let us know what is needed in the comments so the question can be answered. Thank you for helping to improve Microsoft Q&A!