I know there’s a certain performance cost to using thunderbolt 3, but I’m getting extremely slow results with f12 rendering. For example the Bmw27 benchmark takes ~50 minutes.
Strangely, viewport rendering is less slow, but still seems to be underperforming (renders a similar number of samples/viewport size to the final render in ~7 minutes)
Are here any other macOS egpu users who can speak to whether this is expected and if there’s any hope of improvements for this setup?
Thanks!
It has been reported in the bug tracker before, but we have no similar setup ourselves and can’t investigate. In general Cycles OpenCL on macOS is not being maintained due to lack of time. With Apple deprecating OpenCL support, we will likely stop supporting it sooner than later as well.
understandable, and thanks for the reply.
is there likely to be a similar issue going forwards with eevee if apple is deprecating both OpenGL and OpenCL in favour of metal?
just trying to get a feel for whether this movement to metal means blender’s overall support for the Mac platform is likely only going to get worse (with the understanding this is largely apple’s own doing)
It is likely that we will port Blender and EEVEE to Vulkan at some point, which would then run on top of Metal. Until that happens, Blender / EEVEE will continue running with OpenGL on macOS, but there may be worse performance or some features not supported.