maya and cinema got rewrite for metal? I am familiar with octane X. And Redshift is in beta since forever so didn;t count it as acctual one.
Well, Maya and C4D have guaranteed to work properly on the new Apple silicon chipset, they’re not yet optimized for Metal, but Octane X and Radeon ProRender are, and the RedShift beta has gone public, so that means it’s nearing completion. Cycles already has some catching up to do when it comes to macOS.
C4D already uses Metal for the viewport. The native C4D render engine in general doesn’t support GPU rendering at all. Thats why Maxon bought Redshift.
I also really wish blender would work on that! I think it would be a huge profit for Mac users and I really think Apple (with the Mac Pro, the Apple Silicon chips and Metal of course) really want to push Mac Computers back to 3D related stuff.
But I think blender isn’t really interested in marketing opportunity’s. It’s not a company and as far as I understand blender doesn’t see itself in the “competition”. At least that’s what I heard in all the conferences.
But l think this would be a marketing opportunity for Apple. They could help blender porting Cycles (and blender in general) to metal. I mean - they have the money to do that. Since blender is growing steadily it’s getting more important in the 3D industry - and so for Apple, too. And helping an open source project would probably be a benefit for their image. But… I really don’t know how to convince them.
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I hope so. I left macOS and returned to Windows in early 2019 because Apple had ceased support for OpenGL, OpenCL and NVIDIA, leaving me with a Cycles that could only render on my CPU if I would buy a new iMac. I had the last iMac model featuring an NVIDIA GPU, but it was time to upgrade my system. So I returned to Windows, but I’m curious to see how the new Apple chipset will perform in next year’s iMac upgrades.
@MetinSeven AFAIK Vulkan porting is in advanced stage, preparation of code and OpenGL layering milestone should be ended or near to be. What i know is that Clement is working to port of Vulkan from, at least, 1-1.5 year and I expect release of Blender with Vulkan support not before May-Aug 2021, more or less 3 years. All this without add duplication of code and relative problems. You as me and all other can follow progress of Blender development in phabricator.
Talking of marketing over one free software (= not need to pay for use) make me smile a bit. AFAI Blender had in 2019 at least over 5 millions of unique user that download it. Blender survive over donation not over what they sell
That is why it would be marketing perfection! A free software, that is showing power of metal API and M1 chip, and ARM technology. would be perfect easy to pitch. Try it yourself it’s free!.. Apple could make it very popular… the more users… the more easy is for Ton to gain donations. and negotiate. with big companies.
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You need have developers power to do this, and 20 develpers core not have it. Marketing is futile until Blender not make money over number of Blender installed. This not add core developers to Blender project but managers and infrastructure technicians. Apple user lost Blender when Apple drop support of OpenGL and after OpenCL several years agoand can only hope on Vuljan and MoltenVK for Blender.
AFAIK Metal not offer all library needs to code one proper offline render engine as Cycles. If upload numbers released from Blender are real, Blender is already most popular 3D software used on world. It Still most popular without 6% of macOS user and without near 6% of Linux user. I not think all other 3D software have in total over 5 millions of license sell in 2019 or over 12 million of license in 2020, IIRC Blender at end of October had over 15 millions of download from unique IP
Look at it like this: While 20% of random internet users run macOS, Blender has only 6% macOS users. That means people with macOS aren’t working with Blender.
Whether it’s people in Berlin, San Francisco, or New York, any office I’ve ever been in, all the people working with computers used macOS. Meaning developers, designers, video/audio editors, just not necessarily the accountants who are fine with MS Office. To be fair, some game devs had big desktop PC’s but even those people had a Macbook when they aren’t at their desk. Even the google developers I met worked on Macbooks. I myself mostly develop iOS apps, so I have no choice which computer to buy.
What I’m afraid of is that in a professional settings, macs have a market share of over 50%, and by not supporting macOS, Blender is seen even more as a hobbyist tool. The free rendering program used by the kids at home on their gaming pcs.
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It’s not so much blender that doesn’t support macOS but rather the contrary…
But even so, blender would support mac os with MoltenVK
and that wouldn’t require a rewrite of cycles.
Besides, I don’t really think people use mac that much in the 3d industry but I might be wrong.
However if apple can allocate some devs to make the port and maintain it that’s another story.
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I really hope these performance gains will put the most user friendly OS back into the game… I think many people in the 3D space were forced to switch and will gladly come back once it’s a good option.
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Where did you see or read this?
This is the current task regarding Vulkan support in Blender: https://developer.blender.org/T68990
I’ll let you make your own call on how far ahead in development the Vulkan port is. I’m not @NiCapp and can’t tell you why they made their judgement and I’m not a programmer so can’t give you my own judgement on how far into development the port is.
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I think it’s important to make the distinction for blender using using vulkan for the UI/eevee backend and Cycles using vulkan, these are two very separate things. There are currently no plans I know of to make cycles run on top of vulkan.
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That means the whole vulcan topic is irrelevant to the current topic, as this topic is about Cycles using Metal GPU for rendering. Which is also the only thing I care about as a macOS blender user.
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Thank you for your efforts. Now that the M1chip Macs are released is it looking like the target port will be for Big Sur after all? Would that mean Metal Cycles won’t work on Catalina or just slower? Thank you!!
I can’t say for certain. I’ve been unable to dedicate time to my exploration on this feature the past few months due to work, so I haven’t researched it thoroughly, but my guess is that Blender could still target a pre-Big-Sur base macOS version but build an ARM (Apple Silicon) binary and ship it together with the Intel one using the Universal app system so it runs full speed on both architectures. AFAIK nothing about Metal Cycles should require Big Sur.
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i would say that any rewrite of blender considering apple platform should be aimed specially at M1… and future ARM procesors as they will bring crazy performance to portable market laptops and tablets… the current M1 processor have almost same cinenemabench score as flagship macbook pro 16… 8 core i9. Yeah there is ryzen 4800HS with is faster… but this is done in M1… that have crap cooling in MBP 13 inch… Can’t imagine how much performance will bring M2… or whatever they will put in MBP 16 ARM version.
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If the Metal libraries are properly used, they should take care of the underlying architecture, so it doesn’t matter whether thats Intel x86 or Apple M1. I guess thats also the reason why Apple deprecated OpenGL a while ago and is discouraging developers to use OpenGL for any graphics.
In related news Toms Hardware guide did an analysis of the M1 GPU and it’s slightly faster than a GTX 1050 TI: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-silicon-m1-graphics-performance#xenforo-comments-3662289 (Of course the GTX is a little old but is a dedicated 75Watt card, while the M1 shares it’s 13W with the CPU)
PPS: For rendering purposes it will be interesting to see how an iMac sized Apple Chip will perform. So far the iMac / iMac Pro were the head of the benchmark curve of apple devices.
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Just want to chime in to say that I think a Metal version of Cycles would absolutely be worth the effort. Macs may have a small user base on Blender for now but I think it is a chicken and egg scenario; proper Metal integration would draw more users as C4D is the only other good option, but is prohibitively expensive. I personally need a Mac for certain use cases and can’t afford to also invest in a Windows machine on the side, let alone something like C4D. I’m using the new M1 MacBook Air as a temporary device and it has surprisingly competent performance with Blender so far. Bearing in mind that this is only their first and lowest end Mac chip, the Mac is shaping up to be a quite viable platform for 3D graphics work I think. Cheers.
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In the visual effects industry there are no macs -statistically none. Just wanted to add some balance to the picture, but have no horse in this race since I don’t use a mac myself. To my eyes, moltenVK seems like a good investment, both philosophically and pragmatically.
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