There is a download section called ‘Experimental’ and there were published Blender versions less stable than Stefan Werner’s build.
It may sounds weird for you but I use M1 Mac as my main ‘workstation’ now (despite I have much more powerful machine side by side) for ‘professional’ jobs and it works quite nice with non-native (final, alpha, beta) and native (SW experimental) Blender version.
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My point still stands. You can’t take a piece of code that “just works” and integrate it like that in a big project. Doing that too quickly is the best way to introduce more bugs and to create impossible situations for the devs.
Development takes time and money. Especially when it’s related to something as low level as a new architecture.
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Stefan’s AMR64 build is actually pretty great. There are some stupid bugs (like, opening preferences from a full screen Blender crashes it), but mostly it is stable and actually a joy to use on an M1 MacBook Air. Which is the reason why the HP Z tower underneath the desk has been collecting some dust over the last two months.
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Your points are very general, I’d say – invalid at the moment. Why? Because:
- I (and many other) use native Blender at work now for about 2 months
- There are no official info from Blender Institute regarding M1 builds and we even don’t know if they work on M1 version at all. It is weird.
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I agree with n°2 there should be something to clarify what is going on on this matter. However I don’t think there is something clear from apple either.
As for n°1 even if something works well and is stable it doesn’t mean that it is future proof and that it meets the quality standards that blender is aiming for as far as the source is concerned.
I do agree that supporting all platforms is important but it takes time and effort and cannot be rushed.
Look at adobe for example with its billions and its many devs, they have ported only one of their apps to m1.
Whoops 
spoke too soon about n°2:
Native M1 support is planned for 2.93
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This is relevant to Metal (the topic of this thread)how?
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Yeah you’re right sorry about that!
Cool, thanks for digging that out.
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Just a bit of peanut gallery musing about the seeming reticence to allocate resources towards adding Metal support to Cycles:
Supporting Metal in Cycles isn’t something that just requires a single sprint to add the functionality and then gets to work forever.
The big takeaway from the fact that we’re having this discussion is that Apple tends to make unilateral platform API decisions that force developers who want to use their hardware to scramble to keep up. In theory this is generally to make their hardware as performant as possible, but it’s also often done purely to support other initiatives and corporate food-fights that they might be presently engaged in (ie: nvidia or adobe know all about this).
If BF adds a feature to Cycles, they are sort of obligated to support it. Otherwise, when Apple deprecates Metal for whatever replaces it so that they can support handoff between their computers and their phones or whatever, suddenly this board lights up with people talking shit about how BF is dropping the ball on Mac support.
In light of this, I can certainly understand BF wanting the world’s wealthiest tech company to spend their own money on supporting Cycles development.
I am an Apple user. I do professional video work. I like their hardware for reasons stated above. I would love to believe that users like me can crowd onto Apple’s user engagement platforms and apply pressure for them to fund initiatives like this, but we need to be a little realistic.
Apple doesn’t make most of their money from users like us. They are a lifestyle brand. They make their best money from phones and tablets. They are actively engaged in trying to open other lifestyle brand revenue channels in subscription platforms like Apple Music and TV. This is where their priorities are. It’s unfortunate, but people here who want to cope with this by laying into the BF devs are doing Apple’s dirty work. Please be better.
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This sums it up pretty well.
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This is message from a year and a half ago and the one big nothing happened in terms of Metal Cycles. This is nonsense.
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I am so angry and frustrated with the BF that I am tempted to tear the tags off my pillows and mattress 
(sorry if only us in the USA understand this).
When the development fund was announced I knew it would come to this. Since that time we’ve heard a lot about about making the fund grow so MacOS will be listened to. This attitude happens in every human organization. The bigger they get the less responsive to the little guy and the more attention is given to the big sponsors; the main goal is to grow the org., Not the support as much of the purpose on which it was founded.
The fund webpage says that now there is 50% more money than when this thread started and Blender Market consistently gives more than US $5,000 each month to the development fund and we are still hearing that the easiest solution is to give more to the fund? Meanwhile not a whisper on any initiatives we are interested in. The BF can’t convince me that equal treatment of all is their concern.
Necessary or not money has gone to administration and support (see above post); and not even a word about any meaningful initiatives for Mac users. The answer to the title of this thread is NO. There is no support for Mac Metal presumably until all the Nvidia and Windows users and large studios have run low on ideas. Donate to the fund, but don’t hold your breath for anything Mac related for quite awhile.
It still seems that an organized Macuser crowd fund is the only way to get Metal on a reasonable timeline. Two (?) years is long enough. Otherwise this thread is not a debate, rather a forum for venting (also a good thing).
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Everyone wants some part of the blender development fund to be allocated to some features they want.
Seriously! Probably half or more of the threads regarding a possible improvement to blender use the same argument you do. How do you choose?
Why do the bf keeps telling people to contribute? Because having paid developers is really expensive, you have to pay for the hardware they use, to pay their salary, to pay taxes on their salary, and everything else.
Have you looked at how the BF hires? It is mostly people that contributed already to some part of blender for free. I don’t see many patches coming from a metal specialist willing to help.
So who do you give your money to if you are the bf? Someone who spends most of their free time working hard to improve blender, someone you know well and that understands what blender is about? Or a stranger that hasn’t contributed a single patch.
Obviously I’m exaggerating a little bit in my example but that is a real issue. I’m certain if there was a serious contributer working on a metal implementation of cycles the bf would ay least consider hiring him.
Besides blender shouldn’t have to run after apple every time they make a unilateral decision.
When they drop metal for something else what happens to all the work that has been put in metal support?
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I started to follow this thread about a year ago. What I see there is a lot of attention to this topic since the M1 what I’m really happy for!
Unilateral decisions from Apple or not… this is a huge issue. A lot of creative using mac because it’s more reliable for design workflow than anything else. I won’t use windows again and I can’t use Linux because it lack of tools what I need. I’ll follow this topic with interest and hope. That’s all I can do now!
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I’ll drink to that! Salute!
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Haha, that’s it. Although, I’ve always had a backdoor to Windows. And every time I touch it I am swiftly reminded why I stayed away: too much friction in so many places.
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I think the notion of other platforms users getting more from the shared budget is wrong. It’s just that Intel, AMD & Nvidia are interested in having Blender work well on their stuff, which is why they donate developers, money, hardware, libraries and patches, while Apple fundamentally does not care.
People seem to buy their hardware regardless of compatibility, I suppose
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I think you’re right. I also think that more people are familiar with the graphics APIs of AMD/Nvidia. There seems to be a small talent pool for Metal graphics programmers in general. Blender is one of a few open source projects that doesn’t have the human-power to port to Metal.
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I’m not too sure about this. If I remember correctly the App store is the worlds largest gaming platform.
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