I found the reason for your crashes in RPR.
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The fact i’m using a Nvidia on a hackintosh?
I have the same issues on my iMac Pro with vega56
As well as on my MacBook pro + EGPU RX580
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Interesting. I assume the function call translation process will cause some slight processing overhead, and wonder if that will be noticeable for Blender macOS users, or maybe not at all.
I don’t have a clue, but I think vulkan and metal are similar, and so it’s largely “hooking tubes with tubes for compatibility” as opposed to how it would be in making a wrapper to opengl where everything would be more complex and therefore there could be “emulation losses”
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I would love to have Metal support with Cycles. Using either Macbook or MacMini with eGPU with Radeon RX580
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Looks like Apple is announcing their first Apple silicon Macs November 10th. Hoping at least the Blender port they promised to help with will be ready by then. We needs cycles for metal more than ever
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They already contributed code, but it wasn’t Metal related, only to make sure Blender works with ARM.
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Through most of yesterdays event I wondered about how fast Metal accelerated Cycles would be on the new integrated apple silicon. Given what Cinema4D people are claiming it looks like C4D renders very fast, even without a traditional GPU in the system.
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I already made this comment in another thread… If the leaked Geekbench benchmarks are true, “1634 for single-core and 7220 for multi-core” and is coming in the $700 entry level Mac; then the old “86” architecture is maybe getting a little nervous. 
Reportedly the M1 “Apple Silicon” tech is linearly scalable for the high-end future Macs. Which makes me hope Blender foundation is proactive with its adoption of Apple Silicon rather than reactive.
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Interesting times for Apple users. What’s the status of Cycles for Metal? Is anyone actively working on it?
OTOY is rapidly advancing with Octane X for Metal.
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The software companies that decided (maybe saw what was coming? 
) and rewrote their programs for Metal are now starting to see some crazy gains.
This is no way a dig at the Blender foundation and its developers, because I know the task is large and the early signs didn’t point to this. So saying that, I really really really hope the Blender Foundation drops the idea of the “Vulcan wrapper” and just bites-the-bullet and codes a true Metal version.
Quote from the Blackmagic Design website covering the just released today DaVinci Resolve 17.1 ARM version. 5X the performance?!?!?
*** “DaVinci Resolve 17.1 Beta 1 offers universal app support for M1 powered Macs to provide better performance on small laptops. Plus the unified memory architecture on M1 enables DaVinci Resolve 17.1 to leverage the power of CPU and GPU processing more effectively, avoiding the need for PCI Express transfers. Significantly, the combination of M1, Metal processing and DaVinci Resolve 17.1 offers up to 5 times better performance when compared to previous generation computers. DaVinci Resolve 17.1 is also compatible with macOS Big Sur, and is initially only available for Mac.”
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Are you suggesting that the blender foundation drops support for Windows and Linux because a video editing software got performance increase?
Or that it doubles its work for just a little part of the community?
Porting blender to Vulkan is already a huge task and, supporting two different versions of blender would be a nightmare for the devs.
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Maintaining a Cycles version for Metal would probably require only one dedicated developer who propagates the changes made to the regular Cycles version. Nevertheless, the Vulkan wrapper approach is not really disadvantageous in terms of speed, and offers a more generic way of realizing a Cycles version for Metal.
Personally, I’m getting more and more into Octane lately, so if I decide to return to macOS when the ARM-based iMacs have been introduced, I’ll probably go for Octane X.
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Noone has to drop anything.
When Cycles offered CUDA support, it didn‘t mean everyone had to get an NVIDIA GPU.
Metal would just be another item in the preferences menu, next to CPU, CUDA and OpenCL.
Regarding the ‚fraction‘:
Here in germany about 17% of desktop users run macOS in the USA its about 11%. I recon in professional environment the numbers are higher, many people I know have work macbooks and a gaming pc at home.
On my iMac Blender can only render via the CPU and takes about a 3 times as long for the same scene as CUDA enabled AWS instance. I‘ve been hoping for Metal support for a long time.
With the rendering speeds that Cinema4D and Octane are seeing on the Apple M1 chips people will buy these new macs just for the rendering speeds. Mind you, the currently available ones are the macbook air and small Macbook Pro, with 11Watt Chips, the gains will be even higher when they release larger chips.
In many professional setups people might turn their backs on Cycles and work with renderers that support Apple ARM. Which would be sad for Blender.
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@MetinSeven rewrite Cycles for Metal will need 2-3 or more year/man as Vulkan porting already demonstrate. Vulkan porting will not duplicate code and MoltenVK is always better than no GPU render support as until now from several years. Before one developer start doing backport of Cycles patch you need have all brand new Cycles Metal code write and debugged with same level of quality of actual Cycles. Always AFAIK Blender already tell than core developers will not follow this way.
@Bersaelor AFAIK in 2019 only 6% of all Blender unique IP download was do from macOS user, same number of Linux Blender user. AFAIK spend many time and developer power to support one only OS system duplicating code and complexity is out of Blender development rules and plan
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What I mean is that supporting Metal AND Vulkan would be a lot of work both upfront and to maintain. So, given that you can make Vulkan work on mac os a complete metal implementation of cycles or blender would be really a bad use of developer time.
No, not at all. Not sure why you would think that?
I’m only concerned about the “Vulcan wrapper” plan. Having a dedicated Metal version doesn’t mean stopping any Vulcan plans.
Edit: I see @Bersaelor covered this in his answer.
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OK, but Vulkan porting has to be realized for the entire Blender: all OpenGL calls in every corner of the code, while Cycles is a relatively small part of Blender (an add-on to be precise). Where did you read that maintaining a Metal version of Cycles would need three full-time devs?
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i am suprised that this task have some how low priority. as it is great marketing opurtinity. Consdering that today. there is 0 competition in terms of 3D DCC on apple platform… specialy the upcoming ARM stuff… And this is like free market that just waits to be taken. i am pretty sure if blender would be done native on ARM + metal… we would see huge promotion from apple side… and ofc… in schools and all over the world…
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There’s competition: Maya, Cinema 4D, Octane X renderer, Radeon ProRender, RedShift has just released a public Metal-based beta version, and there’s more. Cycles is already behind in the race.
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