Cycles Apple Metal device feedback

I’m thinking that stuff may be being worked on for announcements at WWDC

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I am guessing we will see the 1.1x speed improvement soon as Brecht validated it today.

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sorry, not a native english speaker,… so 1.1x means 10% faster renders?

Yes 1,1 x is the same as 110%.

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Hey all,

Can anyone say when the metal improvements are slated to be released? Will 3.2 or 3.3 include metal performance improvements or are they later than this? I don’t recall seeing it mentioned in the 3.2 notes.

We’re Apple fans at work but we’re about to change to PC workstations because of our view port and render time perf just not being where the team need it, which is sad but I’d like to see if this is about to change. A 2x improvement would fix this for now :slightly_smiling_face:
Thanks :+1:

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A optimization patch is under review, expected to provide a noticeable performance increase here: ⚙ D14645 Cycles: Apple Silicon optimizations (~40% uplift on M1 Max)

As such, it’s possible this patch could be implemented soon. However, based on these rendering meeting notes (link) it seems like some adjustments are expected to be made before the feature gets merged into Cycles. And I don’t know how long it will take to make those changes and so I can’t tell you when this patch will be accepted and merged with Blender.

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40%!
That’s a sizeable jump! Wonderful.

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I’m not completely sure about this but I believe that the 1.1x improvement already landed. Previously around 03:11 in Classroom on my M1 Pro. Now in 3.3 alpha it’s 02:53. Very small change but I think it’s worth mentioning.

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yes it has but from my testing on the 14 core GPU it looks more like 5-8 % depending on scene.

Monster under the bed for example.
3.1.2 no metal rt 350 sec
3.3a no metal rt 324 sec

Classroom
3.1.2 220 sec
3.3a 210 sec

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Hey, on relatively simple scenes cycles on metal has been performing pretty great. but when I start using on some more complex shots with linked libraries with overrides, view layers, and AOVs, I frequently run into issues where things suddenly will stop rendering or the entire system will lock up. the console reports a variety of issues, some of which specifically mention cycles metal (attached screenshots).

its hard to troubleshoot what is causing it, since it can render find one moment, and then the next it fails. and then render fine after a restart.


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Hi all,
On the BMW test, I got 1:24 on Blender 3.3 (May 17 build) and 1:18 on Blender 3.1 (Stable).
Perhaps this is just for this test? I will update this post with some more scenes later when I get the chance. Just wanted to let you all know that the time went down.

Also, MetalRT seems to have disappeared…

Not sure if I’m doing something wrong but on M1Max 64GB running Monterey 12.4 just got 102s on the Classroom and 49s on the BMW scene. Both on the 3.3 Apple Silicon build (GPU only compute)!

Try something else then BMW, it often does not show the differences well, Classrom, Monster under the Bed are better tests.

Also BMW is the only ine I tried that was actually faster with Metal RT on all the others are slower with Metal RT.

The 10% are for Metal RT off.

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Seems correct, same machine as you, got 103 sec in classroom with yesterdays build. (109 on 3.1.2) so about 6%.

Not every scene will get you 10%
From the ones I tried Monster under the Bed show the biggest improvement.

M1 ultra(64)

3.1.2
67s classroom
34s bmw

3.3a
61s classroom
30.7s bmw

With the classroom scene, blender 3.3 was slower again by 16 seconds. 3.1 rendered in 2:44, 3.3 rendered in 3:00

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macOS 12.4
AMD Radeon Pro 460 w/ 4GB GDDR5

Monster Under The Bed
3.1.0 beta: 16:07
3.2.0 RC: 14:50

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@jason-apple I am curious after the announcement yesterday, will Metal 3 help Cycles?

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Or maybe the viewport update fps?

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Pro tip, if you want viewport fps don’t use scaled screen resolutions on Mac.

Example 4k screen.
4k will be fast, so will “looks like 1080p” as it is exactly half, everything in between gets you 1/3 of the performance.

However yes it might help with Eevee next too🤷‍♂️

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