Cycles Apple Metal device feedback

I tried a bunch of scenes on my base M1 MBA. The one with only 7 GPU cores and 8GB ram total.

GPU + CPU is pretty much always 2x faster across the board which is a huge upgrade for a free software only update. Still very far from the 2060 PC laptop I have but I’m not expecting miracles from a M1 which is a consumer grade basic system. I tried everything from a logo animation, a R2D2 model and a graveyard scene I did for a live Halloween DJ streaming event. All render 2x faster which is awesome. I look forward to any optimization juice that can be squeezed out of this.

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Looks like this release:

blender-3.1.0-alpha+master.8c4edd1b379d-darwin.arm64-release

is quite broken. Most rendering tasks lock it up. Some, including enabling denoising on the one project I actually did get to load, cause it to crash the instant viewport denoising is turned on. The Rivet project linked above causes it to lock up in the middle of loading it.

Hi there !

There is a serious issue with the texture and UV on GPU rendering (I’m using M1 Pro).

The CPU one (on top) looks great and the GPU… well, no need to tell what’s wrong.

Not on this modele but sometimes, textures are just all black.

Using the last version (2021-12-30)
Otherwise, a huge thank to the team ! This Mac GPU update is gold <3

I was running the Dec 30 build getting absolutely amazing GPU speeds, 3-4x faster than CPU - suddenly blender started crashing and even after deleting and reinstalling I can’t get those speeds back. It is eating up all 32gb of RAM available even with Persistent Data turned off within 45 seconds of building the render.

Edit: Applied my Adaptive Subdivision modifiers and went back to Supported mode and renders are back to blazing fast on GPU.

A bug report would be appreciated. This can be done by selecting from the top of Blender Help -> Report a bug then filling out all the relevant information.

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Done ! Thanks for the tip !

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For me, the builds from January 6 and 7 crash on starting to render, the builds from the days prior are ok.
Edit: January 8 renders again :slight_smile:

I’ve tested the January 9th build, and the render times have gotten worse than the last build I tested; back when the M1 GPU was first being tested in the alpha build.
my times went from 40-50 seconds to 50-60 seconds.

I just tested the December 30th build, because I heard some good things about it.
The results are closer to what I was getting with earlier builds.
One thing I noticed that was greatly improved over any other build I’ve tested so far; was the render window was able to close a ton faster than it did before if you interrupted the render. Before it would take up to a minute or longer just to close the window if you didn’t wait for the render to finish.

It looks like the current build is only using GPU for rendering even if CPU+GPU is enabled. That could explain the increased rendering times compared to builds where CPU+GPU rendering was effective.

I’m not seeing increased rendering times with the BMW benchmark file, but I can confirm that the CPU is not being engaged during rendering, even when the checkbox is checked in Preferences.

With the latest build it is certain that when both GPU and CPU are selected in “Cycles Render Devices”, only GPU is being used.

MacBook Air 8c/8c on latest macOS Monterey

This is still an issue with the Jan. 13 build.

@Rafal-Sietnik
This should be solved in latest builds, fix from Brecht yesterday:

https://developer.blender.org/rBa3deef6fff7c395512cf56a64d6e026f84d95db2

Cheers, mib

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Hi,

Few issues related to memory usage:

  1. Memory usage on CPU and CPU+GPU is 0
  2. On GPU only memory usage is 10x bigger than peak on CPU/CPU+GPU

I’m having a repeatable crash always when you navigate to the shader editor.

The version of Blender is 3.1.0 alpha and running it on MPB 16* M1 Max with Monterey.

Keep up the good work, the speed with GPU &CPU renders are blazing fast compared to 2.9.
I can’t wait to get to hands on with the production version for the apple silicon. :mechanical_arm:

Crashes and bug reports should be made to the Blender developers website. A bug report can be made by opening Blender, and selecting from the top Help -> Report a bug then filling out all the relevant information to help people reproduce the issue.

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Cheers, I sent the issue directly there. Just can’t wait the proper versions to land :smiley:

Michael Jones - by any chance did updated metal drivers make it into macOS 12.2? And if so, do they perhaps allow for Intel Mac render targets? (particularly AMD graphics cards). I’m not asking if that’s enabled in blender, I can run the dailies… and I am not asking you to rush anything - just if roadblocks have gone away?

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What about AMD GPU Metal???

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AMD GPUs are planned for Metal support in Blender in the future according to the task linked below. It’s not implemented yet as further work needs to be done.

https://developer.blender.org/T92212

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