My experience was akin… also very unsufficient documentation. Hard to get something worth while out of it. Hence we‘re all patiently waiting and lurking in this thread. Octane X might be good, but I suspect nothing can beat the integrated nature of cycles
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I really hope Cycles does eventually come to Metal. IMO the key is to make the core very stable then add features slowly. Get testing nailed from the beginning so bugs can be found as easily as possible. Plus support the latest Apple Metal API only and forget the older stuff. There’s no way to support 10 plus year old gear in Metal - some of the features to make Octane X work have only literally landed in the latest 10.15.6 Catalina and there’s even more in Big Sur. There will be whiners who want to use Cycles Metal on 30 year old Quadra Macs but don’t listen to them… use the Metal API that gets the job done.
Heck Octane X is only supporting VEGA or NAVI cards.
I’ve beta tested RPR since 2017 and I have contributed many bug reports and followed them through to fixes. I’ve also subscribed to Octane X - partly to test it out against RPR but in reality Octane X PR1 is very good, very stable and I can’t wait for the final 1.0 release. It’s documentation is terrible though.
RPR’s documentation is very good to be fair.
I will definitely be testing RPR Core v2 when it is ready and hope it’s as stable as Octane X is. If it is and some of the main shortcomings of RPR Core v1 are fixed I’ll be switching back.
There are some things RPR does its own way in Metal because Octane couldn’t bring their version out without changes being made to Metal itself. RPR is able to support older GPUs than Octane, for instance. There’s a reason for this and it’s in the APIs available to the different Metal versions and GPU drivers from Apple.
I do wish you all the best with Cycles on Metal and will definitely help find bugs when it is available.
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Just adding my voice to this Metal hope, and still a bit stunned at the realisation that my older Mac Pro with High Sierra and CUDA on a GTX Titan, no longer has GPU Cycles rendering support. I’ve used it very happily for so long, and strived hard to keep the machine nVIDIA happy, I didn’t realise the end was coming…
Save us @DrewFitz and thank you for your efforts! And I hope, since Metal seems to kick along nicely with Davinci Resolve and others on my machine, the Blender implementation might support us folks without the latest and greatest hardware too.
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Hey @DrewFitz
I’m on holiday and I have a big rendering job (I only have my Macbook Pro 16" here). I have to render 120 architectural visualizations. But it takes forever to do all the renderings on the CPU. Any chance that you get the Metal support working anytime soon?
It’s not coming anytime soon. Just install Windows (via Bootcamp), the same version of Blender that is on your Mac and then render your project using the GPU that way. My 16” MBP has three partitions- OSX, Windows and an ExFAT formatted “shared” partition where I keep my assets and projects that need to be available to both operating systems.
You might consider the free Blender render farm https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com
Get the Octane X to protect yourself from Windows junk.
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So I installed windows via boot camp. But I have no idea why but it renders way slower on the gpu than if I run it on the cpu in macOS. I looked into task manager and the gpu is only utilized around 10%. Ether it’s a drivers issue of Blender is acting weird. Really sad because I spend the extra money to get the 5600m but I can’t render anything on it. I’ll look into the free render farm and if nothing works I’ll ask a friend of mine to start my pc at the office and render it there. Really annoying. But thanks for the help guys
MacOS GPU / Metal friendly alternatives to Cycles are Octane X and Radeon ProRender.
The Brigade realtime renderer will soon complement Octane X, providing an alternative to Eevee as well, as OpenGL support has been ceased by Apple.
I’ve contentedly worked with a couple of iMac models until it became too attractive to switch back to a Windows PC with a solid NVIDIA GPU last year. I’m still keeping an eye on 3D developments for macOS though, and really hope the broken marriage between Apple and Blender will be repaired. Ideally, Apple should give its users a choice between AMD and NVIDIA, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
Hi, I have read something like this before, Blender does not use your GPU.
Check Preferences > System if Cuda is enabled.
Cheers, mib
There’s a driver update from AMD for Windows for MacBooks with NAVI GPUs like the 5600m. I’d check from AMD directly for the Windows part.
The NAVI drivers have been riddled with problems on Windows.
Octane X on macOS will definitely work very well though.
I wouldn’t be tempted by RPR but it’s worth a go just in case as it supports Cycles nodes so it’s less setup if it does work than Octane X.
I’ve just found Octane X to be rock stable so it’s worth the effort and it’s very fast.
Here’s a link:
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/apple-boot-camp
In the render settings tab change the tile size to 256x256 and see if that speeds things up.
Unfortunately Radeon ProRender is not a „friendly” Cycles alternative in macOS. RPR crashing all the time. It is crap software.
Octane X is great and super stable espacially considering it is first public preview version. However the integration with Blender is not so great as Cycles.
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I almost forgot to mnetion that there’s also a macOS version of my personal favorite renderer: LuxCoreRender. I don’t think it uses Metal (yet), but it does use OpenCL, so it should use CPU + GPU.
Ok this helped. I thought it would be a drivers issue. But one frame is still 29min with GPU and CPU with tile size on 64x64 with Windows. GPU utilization is still on like 10%. On MacOS I got the same time with just the CPU. So something is still wrong. I tired Pro Renderer and the render time is triple. (Just GPU or CPU and GPU, Windows or MacOS). Like WTF the 5600m is support to be as good as a RTX 2060 no? (or a 5700xt). Octane will be impossible to use on this project. I need all my Nodes to work. Does anyone have a better idea what I can do?
Let’s not hijack this thread, it’s supposed to be about Metal support in Blender.
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Made an account just to voice my support of Metal Cycles. I’m a blender newbie who just started learning last month. I’m learning on a relatively powerful iMac and it’s disappointing that I can’t use my GPU to render with cycles. I’ve downloaded ProRender but my relative noobishness combined with ProRender’s frequent crashing has made it really difficult to pick up, so i’m back to rendering stills with cycles and my CPU.
If there’s any way I can contribute financially to this project, I would love to be able to do it. Cheers!
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Can’t imagine someone working in ProRender on Macs. Have tried several times to install and use it in my workflow - it was impossible, crash after crash. More than that, it has a very strange dev preview mode that looks like render preview, and is slow like hell. Now, i’m stuck with my 1080ti + High Sierra + 2.83.5 waiting for a solution.
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Have you tried Octane X (at least for the time being) ? I’m reading positive reviews of it.
What’s the current status of a Metal version of Cycles? Someone was seriously working on it, is that project still ongoing?
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in conjunction with the port of blender to vulkan, these will probably be luckier times for MAC users:
MoltenVK 1.1 Update Brings Big Improvements For Vulkan On macOS
MoltenVK 1.1 is out as a big update for this graphics translation layer for getting the Vulkan API running on macOS and iOS devices by translating calls to Apple’s Metal API.
details here:
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