2022-07-26 Render & Cycles Meeting

[brecht]

@d_dzyuba

But it does on the AMD ones — and that proves that Metal ‘knows’ about it.

As far as I know there is no hardware accelerated ray-tracing for ProRender on macOS, but maybe I’m wrong.

@d_dzyuba

My point is, Metal’s Cycles support somehow ignores the hardware raytracing : it may be something as simple as forgetting to enable it during the release.

Note that there is an experimental MetalRT option in the preferences, to use Metal’s own ray-tracing code. If hardware acceleration gets added it would be through this, but as far as I know it does not exist right now.

@d_dzyuba

I also did notice a sharp drop in performance when I moved from Blender 3.1 to 3.2, BTW.

We haven’t noticed that in our benchmarks, but feel free to post stats in the dedicated feedback topic:

Cycles Apple Metal device feedback

Cycles now has a Metal GPU backend, contributed by Apple. Metal GPU rendering is currently supported on Apple Silicon computers running macOS 12.2 Apple computers with AMD graphics card running macOS 12.3 The implementation is in an early state. Performance optimizations and support for Intel GPUs are under development. Download the latest Blender 3.1 build to test it: Many thanks to Michael Jones and Apple for contributing this. Please use this topic for any user feedback. For technical …