Is there interest in supporting a Metal version of Cycles for MacOS?

This is great. What’s the best way to give you feedback and bug reports as you drop the first iteration of Cycles on Metal? I’ll also be testing it on the new M1X MBP 16" and on my iMac Pro.

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Awesome!! Thanks guys for working on this :innocent:

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Once there is an actual implementation to test, it will go through the regular Blender channels. Bug reports go to the Blender bug tracker, and for feedback we can create a topic here on devtalk.

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Hi Jason,

I would love to contribute via testing - our lab at Wayne state got upgraded to M1 iMacs - and I teach Blender also in my design courses.

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@jason-apple Best news in years :slight_smile:
Glad to see Apple officially joining the Blender crowd. And I am very much looking forward to how it will benefit the community.

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This is all so exciting! Can we have a broad time estimate? I am switching to the MIX Macs coming up, soon! So this was very welcome news!

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https://developer.blender.org/T92212

It looks like it will begin with the 3.1 release. Keep your eye open for the 3.1 betas to drop. Original target was November this year but that may be pushed back since August was the original 3.0 date.

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Well they called them M1 Pro and M1 Max, so lol. But also, the performance on these things specially GPU side is absolutely NUTS. Key advantage being that over 64GB of memory is now available to the GPU. In one of the ads in the Event, I caught one of the guys saying something about now being able to load the 100GB Starship Enterprise into memory (as an example). So it seems Apple is happy to utilise some swap in case things balloon. But this is great. Can’t wait for some numbers on the performance gains with Metal support in blender!

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So it seems v3.1 is out in beta. However, public testing for Metal support does not seem to be added. Any updates?

3.0 is in beta, 3.1 is in alpha has opened for new development yesterday , any new work has the opportunity to land for 3.1 in the next few weeks/months, however that doesn’t mean it was ready to go and land on day 1.

This is the development stage where developers sit down and do the actual work, so it could be a bit before you have anything you can actually test.

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Following this thread… currently using Blender 2.93.5 MacOS release with Catalina on a 2014 Mac mini (2.6Ghz 8Gb Intel Iris), this may not seem much but for me its a huge upgrade from my previous Rpi3b which could barely open a 3rd party Blender 2.79 release. I’m interested to know what are my best options for rendering with cycles in Blender, now or in upcoming releases, there is little chance I will be upgrading to an M1 chip anytime soon so I guess that leaves the question what support Apple and Blender devs can offer for older Mac users with regard to eGPU upgrades?

It’s currently unknown which range of GPUs will be supported by the Cycles Metal backend, we’ll have to find out what works when there is a working implementation.

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@S.I this thread is not for rumors surrounding up-coming Apple products.

As for updates surrounding the Metal implementation for Cycles, they will be released when there is news to be shared. The current plan is to have it available in Blender 3.1, but the timeline can change depending on a variety of factors.

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@S.I and others, news surrounding the Metal implementation is best found in the “Blender Render” meetings that usually happen on a fortnightly basis. Check here for an archive of “Blender Render Meetings”: Other Meetings - Blender Developer Talk

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For anyone .+

missed the news but have been following this thread, the current 3.1 alpha build has Metal!!! Enable in preference pane, you can enable gpu and cpu but beware it will crash in some circumstances and works better with gpu only for now.
Feedback thread is here:

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Now that you’re cross compiling for Intel, will the Metal version of cycles be available for Intel? I build locally on my Mac and don’t see support for Metal yet and haven’t figured out how to enable it in the build.

No, it’s not working yet even if the buildbot is now ready to build it. I believe we are waiting for a macOS driver fixes (or a workaround).

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I’ve added a notice on top of the original post, pointing to the new thread about Metal support for Cycles.

@brecht Maybe it’d be better to close this thread?

Yes, better to keep discussion in one topic.

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