I agree with your post, except for this last portion. I understood the hints regarding helping them porting to their new ARM architecture and not necessarily regarding Metal. Maybe they are going to do both, but that wasn’t obvious in my opinion. They already submitted the ARM changes.
Eevee is OpenGL engine and not OpenCL. Eevee works in macOS just fine.
Oops you are right, no GPU for Cycles.
Whatever.
And I can’t imagine how Apples help could work.
For me that looks pretty complex.
More like a switch from typical cross platform Apps
to a separate branch for Apple Silicon.
Great to hear about submitted ARM changes.
eevee is usable, but not as robust as on windows (and presumably linux). volumetrics with textures has been broken on a number of mac gpus. from what i understand in the bug report discussions, it has been a pain for developers to handle these sorts of issues on macos.
hoping all the vulkan stuff helps improve the situation though.
… and Eevee on Mac is significantly slower than Windoze version. Moreover, over time there will probably be more and more problems, as OpenGL is unlikely to be updated by Apple. For me Eevee works quite good at the moment, however it often takes a lot of time to fake different effects or fix visual bugs and this is not related to Mac version. I realise Eevee is a temporary solution and I hope it will be replaced with Brigade which will be build in Octane X this fall.
I really liked eeVee till I found LuxCore also supports viewport denoiser …
I didn’t use a Luxcore, but Cycles has denoiser too, and it’s absolutely not suitable for realtime animation. Eevee can be used for very simple animations only. I hope Brigade can handle bigger scenes realtime.
Can I ask what half of this has got to do with Apple goes ARM?
LuxCore takes so long (upwards of 30 minutes) to compile its OpenCL kernel on macOS it is nigh on unusable but the latest version does at least install on Catalina. The CPU version works well - but may as well use Cycles if CPU rendering is your thing.
Apple has made sure Blender will work on ARM from day one. Patches supplied.
Apple were never really likely to make Blender or Cycles work with Metal though, however much we hoped that would be the case.
Octane X looks like the best chance for GPU rendering on macOS. Brigade will also be Metal and replace EEVEE.
RPRv2 (when that is out) may have Hybrid mode as well on macOS.
I’ve switched to Octane X with Blender on macOS and it’s truly worth the subscription. I couldn’t be happier. It works. Doesn’t crash. Looks great. Can’t wait for the v1.0 release.
PR 1.1 is out but only for Standalone. It was out last week but hidden on the forum until today!
discussion is about many things here in case you did not notice
you might need Bridgade for your realtime stuff but thats one area of application
thats nice to have but denoise an Lux is fine particularly who well light is calculated in Lux for archviz work
The test scene in Lux are looking well after 1 to 2 minutes or less if you want to use less samples thanks to denoiser.
They also look into a metal version for LuxCore now and I would not be surprised if Blender might get the same. Moltan Vulcan seems not that much used by apps I use. They primarily switched to Metal.
so what do you think about apples move to only allow signed code to run on apple silicon? the direction they are going sounds horrible to me.
I read that you can still execute non signed code too by giving users a choice like with gatekeeper right now.
I give apple a lot of credit for going ARM.
But the lack of CUDA and big GPUs is a concern for me.
Good my old 2010 macPros still rock so well
I did a test and the new computer lab PCs xeon six cores and quadro rtx 4000 are not faster than my old crap
you will be able to run your own code own your own mac with a special local signature (how gracious :)). but your code won’t run on your friends’ mac. you have to join apples developer programm and pay for it. looks like osx really will be restricted like ios very soon.
there are a lot of apple-wtf-moments recently also with the wordpress app thing for example… but that’s a bit offtopic here.
Octane X as a macOS Cycles replacement and Brigade as a macOS Eevee replacement sounds good, but reading about Apple’s ongoing crippling restriction policies I keep being reluctant to consider a return to Mac, although I really wish it wasn’t like that.
What restrictions? The Mac can run software from any source. You just have to authorise it yourself to open. It warns you. It doesn’t prevent it running.
at the moment you can still run unsigned code after you accept the warning. this won’t be possible anymore with arm macs.
Yeah I start getting the same feeling for myself. Catalina or maybe BigSur will be the last OS that will run on those old macPros.
The new mac would be great for side car with my ipads but that is the only thing that I cannot do right now.
And windows10 got pretty good. Sucks for Apple
That’s not my understanding of it at all. I watched all of the WWDC videos and they said it will be exactly the same on Apple Silicon.
I really hope 3D creators will be more embraced by Apple. At the moment Windows is simply more flexible for 3D creators, Blender users in particular. I left macOS in 2019 because of that, with a certain degree of regret.
There are still many aspects to macOS that just make win10 look like a sad joke.
How PDF is implement. Quicklook. Don’t get me started about windows explorer and the slow speed of moving copy and delete files.
But yeah macOS has RPR for metal and the windows version can use Vulcan with a fake GI.
For 3D and CAD it seems macOS has some good apps like 80% but the 20% like for me REVIT or Autodesk Alias force me to use Win10.