I’m an ex Mac user who was tired of waiting, and was longing to return to NVIDIA hardware and being able to utilize all Cycles rendering options. I’ve returned to a Windows system, and I don’t regret that decision.
I think it’s a pity Apple has chosen to discontinue OpenCL and OpenGL support, as well as NVIDIA hardware support, in favor of AMD GPUs and Metal. Metal is undoubtedly a great graphics engine, but with their current strategy Apple is drifting further away from common standards in 3D hardware and software, alienating 3D users working with Macs, and making it harder for developers to keep their software cross-platform compatible.
Yes I see this is is more or less the consensus on the topic. In fact, I myself sort of switched to Windows for similar reasons. It wasn’t only Blender, but also Fusion wich had some troubles on my MacBook Pro. That was two years ago. I know how to bend Windows to my will, but it remains a wonky behemoth that I’d like to ditch again sooner than later… Meanwhile, BMD and SideFX, among others, appear to adopt Metal. I hope that the trend continues.
I see that there are obstacles, but still hope that devs will find a way. I joined the development fund in order to support core development for ALL platforms and hope that more Mac users will follow and make themselves heard.
If Apple would give buyers a choice between an NVIDIA or AMD GPU, that would make it more attractive to go for a Mac. And if developers really start supporting Metal, so all important tools and advantages will be available for macOS, I won’t mind switching back. Blender has a long way to go in that area though. Metal will eventually be supported via a detour in the shape of MoltenVK.
You can still render with Cycles using Nvidia GPUs using CUDA (up to Pascal series) on OSX 10.13.6
Unfortunately there is no sign of Nvidia drivers for latest OSX versions and RTX GPUs.
Apple and NVIDIA have a very troubled relationship
So I doubt we will be seeing NVIDIA GPUs any time soon inside Apple products. In the end it should not matter we need a cross platform API anyway that will be embraced by all companies. Maybe Vulkan could, in the future, fill that role, maybe not. Time will tell. Metal has been massive success for Apple, developers switched to it very fast but then 99% of it is used through game engines which made the transition a lot easier anyway.
Just circling back on a previous post in this thread… I’m now part of the fund with hopes of improving the Blender-Mac situation not just for cycles, but also in general. If there a dedicated campaign were created for this I would bump up my contribution level immediately.
Hello everybody! I follow this discussion for quite a while. I’m thinking about switching over to blender from C4D in the future but I use to work on a Mac. Anyways…
I wanted to ask what the new AMD sponsorship could mean to this topic? I read that they want to help with the support of Vulkan in Blender. But what would this mean for the Cycles GPU render on macOS?
I asked this question today at Blender Con. I unfortunately did not receive clear answer on this. I will visit Blender Institute tomorrow I will try to investigate further.
Cool, I saw your question on the livestream. I also thought that the answer wasn’t really clear. Thats why I wanted to ask it here again. Good luck tomorrow!
I did not find out any information that would not be in circulation already. AMD sponsorship is however a good signal for things to move. Beside Cycles there are Octane and Redshift coming to Mac OS/ Blender soon. AMD Pro Render is already somewhat developed. What is your main reason to leave Cinema 4D? This would be funnily my plan B instead for Blender.
Thanks for your research!
Yes I already use AMD ProRender in Cinema 4D and I also tried it in Blender. But I would prefer to use the native Render Engine for Blender which supports all the native Features of Blender. There is nothing wrong about C4D it’s a great software. But I really like the whole Blender project. And it’s cool to have a choice how much money I can pay for it depending on how much I can afford. It gives me more independence and I’d like to support that. But thats a bit off-topic now.
So, anyway, it’s good that with the AMD sponsorship there is at least hope that Cycles GPU render on macOS could work again sometime in the future.
@d_miko was that your question about AMD and Vulkan? There’s many aspects to this, and your question as answered with regards to a future Vulkan port of the workbench and Eevee engines (which, is to my understanding, is being worked on).
Getting Cycles GPU rendering on macOS is something that Apple has more influence over than AMD (remember, many Macs ship with Intel GPUs and not AMD). I don’t know if Vulkan will be a solution for this, as far as I can tell MoltenVK is focussed more on rasterization than compute and the Khronos group does not consider Vulkan to be a replacement for OpenCL. I would love to be proven wrong, but as far as I can tell, Metal is be the best option for Cycles GPU on macOS.
@StefanW: No Vulkan is not gonna replace OpenCL, but they will interop:
“The Khronos OpenCL Working Group will soon be starting on a Vulkan/OpenCL interoperability extension. NVIDIA already has been working on such but now it’s up to the working group to come to a multi-vendor approved extension. This is akin to OpenGL and Vulkan interoperability.” -. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-OpenCL-Interop-2019 January 2019
After reading this article I had an impression Cycles would be ported to Vulkan like Pro Render. I think however Pro Render uses Vulkan only for hybrid rendering and for full pathtracing still uses Metal. Could potentionally AMD help cycles to run on Metal? Do companies have to pay to Apple if they weant to have apps use Metal? Some Devs and Ton have voiced that Blender will not support Cycles on Metal. Which would mean GPU rendering for Mac OS is off the table.
Cycles is programmed to generally be able to use different low level apis. Think of Cycles mainly sitting on a layer above the low level api calls. Cycles parts which make the direct lowlevel api calls will be rewritten by AMD ( or programmers hired by their money) to run on Vulkan instead of OpenGL and added to the codebase.
No they are not paid for this. But nonetheless was a strategic decision to come up with metal and not start support for another api, present or in development. They are decoupling their ecosystem and try to bind developers and products tighter with their custom apis to their ecosystem. For a developer of a tool like blender this just means a lot more work to do. The decision not to bring Blender to Metal may be generally due to Metal not being Open Source, the additional amount of work to maintain support for it or due to Apples strategy behind Metal one can dislike, but that’s all just my guess. If MoltenVK and OpenCL will work well on Mac, then it’s clearly the preferred solution for a cross platform tool like Blender to stick with Vulkan everywhere.
I think the reason Ton don’t want Metal support is because it will make the code base more complex.
Blender is more than 2 million lines of code so keeping things simple is paramount. Ideally Blender was to use one framework and currently Vulkan is the best option. But will take a long time to port the obligation. I don’t think its a good idea to depend on a single company project because if it dies it creates all sort of problems , OpenGL being dead is already a big problem for Blender.
Apple does not require you to pay because they are greedy. This is merely a measurement to keep amateurs away so the can keep the quality of apps high, combined with app store strict requirement. Apple has always being supporting of amateur coders by packaging its OS with all sort of easy to use programming languages like python, ruby etc and providing active support for them. They also designed Applescript which you may not hear a lot about but is super popular in the macos community because you don’t need to be coder to use.
So no you don’t have to pay apple to use Metal , you don’t have to pay Apple even to download the OS , it’s free. As long as you keep far away from the app stores which are designed for mostly high quality pro apps/games you are fine. Steam use to be a lot more open of the games they accepted and then they also forced to introduce pretty much the same recipe as Apple to make sure they keep quality at least adequate. They had a lot of issues with early access games.
Also Apple is supporting Vulkan , they are part of the board that decides how it evolves, so Vulkan on MacOS looks very promising. I also think Vulkan will eventually replace Cuda and OpenCL.
Some Devs and Ton have voiced that Blender will not support Cycles on Metal.
When? Where?
Nobody is opposed to Cycles running on Metal. The “only” thing that’s missing is that nobody is working on it. If anyone came up with a patch for a Metal backend for Cycles, I can’t think of a reason why the BF would reject that patch.
Cycles already has support for CUDA and OptiX, both of which are vendor-specific proprietary APIs. Why would Metal be any different?
Platform Specific Optimizations/Features - if so how extensive?
If Blender is going to implement Metal Support, then why not also allow a developer to implement DirectX Support on Windows and add in features like WinML and DXR that could bring Cycles performance closer to Eevee on Windows with all GPUs?
This could be a good plan forward with Platform specific optimizations; however, it also opens the door to a lot of problems and fragmenting Blender, which seems bad.
Ideal option, get Apple and Microsoft to donate to Blender, and assign a developer to maintain Metal and DirectX?
Metal is more important right now for Apple users, as Apple is forcing out open source frameworks.
However, if moving to Vulkan bypasses the Apple Metal issues, maybe not ‘reward’ Apple for being horrible about Metal.
It appears Vulkan is the answer to Metal, and all platforms would gain benefits, and the same opportunity at new features.
Just my 2 cents here. Blender is supposed to be a cross platform open source tool. How can it claim to be cross platform and not support the graphics APIs set forth by each platform?
I realize it is easy to blame Apple here but while Windows has DirectX and they still support OpenCL there is absolutely no reason why Windows couldn’t also drop OpenCL support at some point in the future.
It is kind of up to the software to support the platforms to their fullest and I don’t exactly think it is fair to blame Apple for wanting to create a superior method of utilizing GPUs on their systems in much the same way Microsoft created DirectX.
Like it or not but almost all commercial software is going to be supporting Metal and if Blender wants to be a cross platform tool taken seriously I think they need to do the same. I think it is a mistake to ignore the Mac community. If Blender wants to increase their importance in the industry I think they need to embrace MacOS and Metal and fill in a 3D gap in the Mac world. If most Mac users that want to dabble in 3D use Blender that could open up a ton of community support.
Metal is a great platform with a ton of performance potential and isn’t that what we all want with Blender? While it may be more effort I really think Cycles needs to be ported to the method that can get the most performance out of each system. I for one would forego any other features if the time and effort could be spent to enhance Cycles to each platform instead of the one size fits all approach.
I also realize Blender is used by a larger percentage of Windows users who may not have a favorable view of MacOS. We shouldn’t let that diminish the cross platform nature of Blender and take away one of the most golden aspects of what makes Blender great. Providing professional level 3D tools to everybody.
As for donating right now I will not donate to Blender unless they fully support my platform of choice. I cannot invest in a tool that will not invest in me and ignores Mac users as if they do not matter. The same could have been said for years for Linux when it came to video codec support and sketchy hardware/driver support.