Has Dev Team Given Up on MacPro GPU Support?

I am stuck using a mac pro with dual FirePro D500 3Gb cards at work.
When I try to use Blender 2.79 GPU compute on Cycles I get a compiling message (first time) then I get an error.

All googling leads to
https://developer.blender.org/T44674

This is a three year old post where the dev team blames apple and appears to have given up.

Is this still where we are on GPU rendering on the MacPro as of 2018?

I think part of the issue is that the drivers for the GPU’s in Macs are written by Apple and not AMD (due to wanting as much control as possible over the user experience on their machines).

It’s why Cycles hasn’t formally moved to OpenCL 2 yet. Both Nvidia and AMD have released drivers that include support on PC’s, but Apple has yet to add support for that version.

It has nothing to do with blaming or giving up. The drivers from Apple are broken and as soon as they are fixed, it should work. The same problem was reported again in 2017 and as far as I know, there has been no effort from Apple to resolve the driver issues.

The situation improved a bit since that report, there were some fixes in the Apple OpenCL driver in 2016. I know some people have successfully used the official 2.79 release on macOS 10.12. However things break often, different macOS versions might fail, and even when it works performance is not great.

The problem is that the Apple OpenCL driver is still buggy and outdated, and has not been updated since 2013 besides some bug fixes. If you report a bug with the error message from the terminal we may be able to solve it, depending if we can work around what is likely another bug in the driver. OpenCL on macOS seems to be a dead end, they’re focusing on Metal Compute, but last I heard it was not mature enough to use for a renderer like Cycles.

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Thanks for the update. I am stuck on 10.10.5 OSX, for now. So I guess I’ll have to bug the tech department to try and update my machine.

If bootcamping, you could try mxDriver (https://www.mxdriver.com/). Not sure what OpenCL version it uses, It uses the AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.8.1 if that helps.

I’m hoping Apple maybe fixes that in near future, because of eGPU support becoming official soon. Now every Mac with TB3 port could possibly have a decent GPU connected and I think it makes sense to to update those drivers . But I also think statement “There’s nothing Blender devs can do.” Is not true. GPU based AMD Prorender works on Mac no problem.

The statement in the bug report was made before Apple did fixes in their OpenCL driver, it was true at the time. Cycles generally works now with AMD GPUs on macOS, although performance is not great, partially because if we enable certain optimizations we run into driver bugs.

My understanding is that AMD ProRender on macOS was delayed after other platforms (not sure what the status is now, there still seems to be no macOS download link on their website?). And of course it was released after those OpenCL driver fixes, and if they encountered other problems then I imagine AMD had more resources and influence to get them fixed.

Pro Render does not even support macOS for Blender (https://pro.radeon.com/en/software/prorender/blender/)

As to cycles, Blender 2.79 on the 2013 Mac Pro with dual D700’s under macOS works but renders slower than it’s 6 core xeon CPU so no point using it.

It’s currently Beta. A guy on egpu.io forum with name Gelert has tried it out with external AMD Rx580 and it worked great. If interested, you can get beta here: https://discordapp.com/invite/Xy9wUFj
Also Indigo render which is OpenCL based works on MacOS.

Thanks. Will give that a try and report back. The 2 x 6GB D700’s have 3.5 teraflops of power per card where a dingle RX580 has 6.1 teraflops so If it works then it should render to a similar level.

As others said we have support pending for OSX. Haven’t tested it on a mac pro but would be interested to hear results.

Blender 2.79 requires atleast a gcn2.0 card, the D500 appears to have a Southern Islands architecture (gcn1.0), normally blender hides gcn1 and older architectures from the user (since as you noticed they don’t work right) not sure why it didn’t do that.

I posted in the Discord #Blender channel asking for a DL link but heard nothing back yet. Will post my findings when I can test it out.

Cheers

Ok, got the RPR Beta and straight off the bat the D700 card is classed as unsupported when installing (with a popup telling me so).

Checking this page: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202823 it would appear the 2013 Mac Pro supports OpenCL 1.2 but RPR said it was using OpenCL 1.1 and continued to install.

Midway through messing about (which works but was slower than gpu cycles) my isp/network went down which locked up Blender for some reason. Will have another dabble when I get time.

Brian is the Kings of Royal of renderers! He wrote the renderman AND ATI Prorenders for blender!

We all greatfull for your work dude - with you we have finally real render engines for world grade works!

Yes!!

And now it does :wink:

Interesting, I will be trying that out later. Thanks for the update.

Here is a thread:

After the initial shock with Apple removing openGL and CL and pushing metal it seems the majority of the industry was shifting already to Metal anyway and more did so now too.

So is AMD ProRender Metal 2 ready.

Too bad this has not enough weight to compete with NVIDIAs CUDA dominance.

I just booted up the Mac Pro

Installed latest Blender + ProRender
Fired up Blender, selected ProRender as render engine
enabled CPU + 2 x D700 and gave it a whirl.

1st attempt
Deleted cube, created monkey head
As soon as I clicked Material Preview (used to be LookDev mode) it crashed Blender

2nd Attempt
This time I just left the default cube.
Clicked material preview. It started to render the default cube, took 4.5 seconds to hit 65 samples.
Disabled CPU for rendering. Still took 4.5 seconds!
Disabled 1 GPU, again, still took 4.5 seconds!
Added a plane
Crashed

3rd Attempt
Default cube, enabled Material Preview, added Uber shader to it
Added SubDiv modifier
Blender crashed

Looked at ProRender release notes and it says that it has not been tested in current version of macOS so not much point continuing to evaluate this.