Oh, this is truly unfortunate. So no point to upgrade current i7/amd 6800 rig but start waiting for next mac studio M4 ultra. Fortunately did not invest any money to mac pro cheese grater workstation, which all will be obsolete now.
Itās seriously bad news for those of us who have Mac Cheese Graters. It was a huge investment which is now a flaming pile of trash.
Just for the record, Intel and AMD GPU Mac users can continue to use any older version of Blender that supports their GPU, including 4.2 LTS and 3.6 LTS which are still getting roughly 2 and 1 years of bug fixes respectfully.
This change only impacts Blender 4.3 and above.
You can still use CPU render on those machines.
Depending on the exact specs it would even be faster. And in any case CPU will be more reliable and correct. Quite a bit of features has been already disabled on those GPUs, and the rest are either slow or not working reliably even in 4.2
The new version 4.3 for my Apple silicon M1, Iām downloading it says MacOS ā x 64.DMG
but my already installed 4.2 under info it says - Application (Apple silicon).
So is this an error x64. means intel to me??
Please select the Apple Silicon build from the drop down menu on Download ā blender.org if you get the x64 one. The website should give you the correct one automatically though.
The website did not give me the Apple Silicon version, itās info is x64. I tried to download Both versions, few times both info has x64?
Direct link to the arm64 version for Apple Silicon:
Thanks it worked. It seems that all those other ones I downloaded theyāre the same but it would not say Apple silicon till after I download and install; the 64 got me confused because I used to think 64 bit Mac was the Intel.
Now Iām cooking
This āannouncementā has been communicated very poorly imo. I updated to 4.3, and was troubleshooting for quite a while why GPU rendering couldnāt be enabled. Only after some specific Google searching I found this thread.
There was no note of this in the release notes for 4.3, and basically this is the only thing I have found out about this change.
And while I do understand the reason to remove it, this still feels like a middle finger to anyone using Blender on an older Mac. I think it would have made more sense and been more reasonable, if the devs could have kept the support at least until Intel Macs officially get cut off from new macOS feature updates. There are Macs as new as from 2020 that are affected by this change.
I did look through those, but maybe not thoroughly enough. Still though itās quite a major change only to get a small footprint at the bottom of the release note page. I typically do look at the release notes before updating yet I still missed it. Might just be a skill issue on my part, but either way I still donāt think this is a good change.
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Cycles has already gone through roughly a year and a half of this treatment.
Cycles on AMD and Intel GPU Macs frequently had features removed or tweaked to make sure they kept functioning somewhat okay on the respective hardware. Examples include:
- Light tree is unavaliable as it resulted in a major performance regression, even while turned off.
- MNEE is unavaliable as it resulted in a error.
- Rendering of the entire scene is way slower if any of your materials contains a Principled Hair BSDF
- NanoVDB isnāt supported (although this is mostly a backend thing)
- Kernel caching was disabled
- And probably a few other things (I see PATCH EVALUATION was selectively enabled, presumably due to performance issues related to that)
And with each new feature in Cycles, more time had to be spent tracking down what could be disabled or tweaked to allow Cycles to continue to partially work on these devices. And it could get in the way of advancing Cycles further.
Trying to support this hardware for another 3-4 years (probably when they will stop getting macOS updates) was going to be hard if Cycles continued to develop. So support was decided to be removed, and the focus was shifted towards improving all the other platforms that do work.
Support was NOT removed from 4.2 LTS so users can get 2 years of bug fixes on the last version that supports their GPU. And CPU rendering in Cycles on Intel CPU Macs was not removed as it has no issues. And may even be supported for years after Apple stops supporting these devices (Although EEVEE is seeing issues with AMD and Intel GPU Macs, so support for these devices from Blender as a whole may be removed if issues get too bad)
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Making āWe removed support for your hardwareā a major feature in a new release just looks bad. Making it tiny or hidden is also bad.
I personally feel itās current presentation on the release notes is a bit subpar. This is an important change and should be more visible. Maybe it should be bold so it stands out more, or shifted to a ācompatibilityā section on the release notes page with something to make it eye catching (E.g. A different color). But these are just personal opinions.
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This is unfortunate and really bad news for me. I have 50k in 2019 Mac Pro purchased in 2021 so from an investment standpoint that would be a huge hit having to upgrade hardware again. With the cost of hardware these days who can afford to upgrade every 3-4 years to keep up with developmentā¦ I understand the time and cost associated with development, accommodating platforms but it is too soon in my opinion as Intel Mac still have relevance in the industry.
Well, on a plus side, you could spend a tenth of that Mac Pro cost on a top end Ryzen CPU and soon to be released RTX 5090 and have a PC which will run Blender (and most other things), that will make the 2019 Mac Pro look like a snail.
Iām quite aware that there are much faster machines than my current Mac Pro. Even at a fraction of the cost. That said should users go out and replace there hardware or change their ecosystems every few years to keep up with development. Its about getting the return on your investment, and for me Blender is not the only thing I run on this machine, it flies with everything else so to upgrade just for Blender is not money well spent.
How does a Mac Pro cost $50,000?
Is that USD or ā¦ rubles?
Yes a fully maxed out 2019 Mac Pro was 50k CAD. Thatās the tower, not a Mac book, iMac or Mac min/studio.
Except its not really a development issue, itās as much a manufacture hardware support issue. If a multi-trillion dollar company doesnāt feel like supporting itās ālegacyā hardware and itās customers that spent a bucket load of cash on said Mac, then I donāt think itās fair to expect a tiny software organisation like Blender to spend itās very limited resources in trying to keep said legacy hardware fully running just the same as more ācurrentā hardware.
Keeping in mind, that ācurrentā hardware, from a Windows/PC point of view, can be a good 10 years old and still fully work. At least work as well as one can expect from 10 year old hardware.
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