The situation of AMD and Intel GPU support in Cycles on macOS (Getting support in 2022, then having support removed in 2024) should hopefully be a one off occurance. And if you buy new hardware today, it should ideally work with Blender and/or Cycles for another 7-10 years.
However there is no garuntee that it will get 7-10 years of support as it relies on:
The vendor (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, etc) creating reliable enough software that can be used for that time frame.
A good example of this is NVIDIA. Although NVIDIA hasnāt supported their Kepler GPUs (released 2012) for many years now, their 5 year old compiler that does support these GPUs can still compile Cycles code for these GPUs.
Disclaimer: I have not tested a Kepler GPU, so although the code compiles, there may still be issues with it. But I have tested a Pascal GPU (released in 2016) and it didnāt have any issues in my testing.
Or the vendor constantly provides support and bug fixing for their software for that time frame.
Or the Blender developers working around the issues during that time frame (The Blender developers do try to work around issues where they can. But once the work around get too large and invasive, support is typically removed).
Iām adding myself to the list of saddened intel Mac GPU users.
Maybe with a large community response this situation can be reevaluated?
Early this year, 2024, I purchased a used Blackmagic eGPU for my intel Mackbook Pro. After seeing the improvements in Blender rendering time, I invested in the last intel Mac Mini to support eGPUās, since Apple too removed eGPU support on M Macs. I then also bough a higher spec but affordable Trash Can Mac to try my hand at a Flamenco set up. This news makes all my years investments obsolete, If I want to stay up to date with Blender after 4.2.
Sadly most of the issues Cycles had to deal with were in the Metal GPU drivers and/or compiler provided by Apple. So the community response needs to be large enough to convince Apple to fix those issues. And the desire for Apple to fix those issues decreases the older those Macs get.
Alternatively, Blender is open source. If you want to keep using Metal GPU rendering on your Mac with new versions of Blender with all itās limitations, then you can build Blender yourself and just modify the code to re-enable it. And someone in the community may even do this for you (but always be cautious downloading unofficial versions of apps).
Here is a unofficial build of Blender 4.3.2 with AMD and Intel Metal Cycles GPU re-enabled. It is basically untested.
The Blender foundation (as they are not responsable for this build) and myself (as the creator of this build) do not provide support for this version of Blender. Please do not fill bug reports from this build.
Just few notes to hopefully clarify the situation.
When it comes to render algorithms, even Blender 4.2 is not feature complete on AMD Metal (Light Trees, MNEE). And some features are enabled conditionally and will drastically reduce render performance (micro-displacement, Principled Hair BSDR).
This means that from the rendering algorithm perspective you will not give any advantage of the newer Blender versions for AMD Metal, as weāre already at the limit of what the compiler can do.
The less obvious thing: adding new render algorithms even in a way when you keep them disabled on those platforms is hard as with any non-functional refactor you need to do as a developer to fit the new feature you have very high risk of introducing compilation error or a severe performance regression.
Surely, there are features outside of the render engine which you might be benefitting. The workaround would be to bake .blend file and render it in older Blender versions. Surely it is less than ideal, but in the reality it is more practical approach assuming the size of the team weāve got.
Another thing I wanted to clarify is the 4.3 build with the AMD Metal enabled. It is fine as something community-managed, but it is unofficial: if it works - great, if its not - its not. We can not guarantee anything about it, and will not accept reports about this platform.
Not sure how strict we want to be about it, as it is technically coming from the official channels. Personally I am fine with that as long as the expectations are set clearly.
That has been mentioned previously, and should be the standard auto-reply for anything related to dropping Mac Intel support.
The cause of this situation is Apple not supporting the hardware.
As Alaska said - it is not reasonable to expect the Blender team to support (and only partially, as Sergey has documented) hardware that Apple itself - a multi-billion dollar company - has abandoned.
Actually, they are a multi-trillion dollar company (at the exact time Iām posting this, they have a market cap of $3.83 Trillion on the NASDAQ, yes I checked that more then once, since it sounds insane).