Yeah, although I really hope a more powerful (30 inch) Apple Silicon iMac will be released soon, which will really be able to utilize Blender’s powers.
We’re really excited to work with the Community on enabling Cycles on Metal. Cycles works great on macOS, and we want to ensure you experience it as such also.
Any questions or feedback on the work as it lands over the coming weeks is both welcome and encouraged, and we’d certainly like to hear from those looking to early adopt and try out Cycles on Metal in your workflows.
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When will the first test build available?
I’m eager to test it with the M1
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We’ll bring a feature branch up with a fully Metal-enabled version over the coming weeks, as we tidy up the code and break it up into atomic commits that make sense for code review.
The first commit was the most invasive, touching all function signatures that took an undecorated pointer.
I expect our next commits will add the metal_compat.h and they remainder of the kernel changes needed to compile as MSL, along with the main kernel entry point wrappers. Then we’ll add the host side device.
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This is amazing news! Big thanks to Apple for the support!
I do have a question about what the future might hold for Apple and Blender after Cycles is up and running on Metal. It sounds like moving the entire Blender code base away from OpenGL is going to be a huge endeavor. Does Apple intend to provide future assistance to the Blender team when the time comes to make the switch to a native Metal version (Or Vulkan/MoltenVK)?
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That’s fantastic Jason!
I’ve been hoping for this since the disappointment that my nicely specced AMD iMac couldn’t use GPU for cycles. I temporarily used a Linux box, but I’ve since switched to an M1 Mac mini, and those GPU cores are chomping at the bit to do some work. I know your work is cut out for you, but there has been talk on other forums about viewport using metal as well, and possible AI denoise support, just FYI
I’d say those two things and of course cycles and evee support are the four main integrations.
There are people talking of Blender being ported to iPad but I’m not even sure that makes sense, as the UI would need a huge rewrite. Although I can currently sculpt on iPad with an apple pencil using sidecar connected to the mac, some improvements there would be very welcome. That’s all I can think of now.
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Thanks for the feedback - we are certainly intending to support Blender as a whole, and our teams are focused on the overall workflow experience of using Blender on Mac and how that can be improved.
On the technical side, we’re ready to talk about Cycles on Metal, and get that tech contributed back smoothly for the 3.1 release.
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good news sure looking forward to try this.
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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 
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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 
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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