Many drivers are problematic. Of course they should get fixed on their end, but a platform being crappy is still a long way from us abandoning it. Or we would never support Intel GPUs for instance 
In addition to this, the comments from Ton come from Twitter I believe. He got behind an initiative to tell Apple that their support for OCL is unacceptable as long as they continue to push themselves as a realistic platform for artists.
Link please?
What a difference to this one:
Recently Ton Roosendaal mentioned the problem has gotten to the point that they may have to abandon OS X as a viable platform for further Blender releases.
Moderators should lock this thread because it becomes poisonous to the community, full of speculations and misleading.
Why poisonous? Isnāt it good when communities get together and partition to fix it.
Take a look at how long it took for AMD to fix their driver thing.
I fail to see the āpoisonousā attribute as well. That Blender support for OSX is not being dropped is good. Thatās also an impression that has been corrected because of this thread.
That doesnāt change the key issue though which is that, more & more, Blender relies on up-to-date drivers & support for itās UI & renderingā¦ which Apple is not providing. What better way to fix that then by showing Apple that there is the potential of losing an important segment of their market (graphic studios & artists) if they donāt fix this.
Remember, Apple is all about the image and, due to their whole ācool hipsterā thing theyāve got going, losing artists is not good for that image.
Looking at how apple has being developing its last OSes, and never fixing bugs, they donāt seem to care to loose mac users in general, not artists only;
sad to say by a mac user since the '80s.
paolo
Closing this thread and sweeping the problem under the figurative rug isnāt going to make it magically disappearā¦
Na - as long as this does not turn into a OS flame war (people still love doing that) I think this would rather be a good thing to raise attention.
Personally I run an old 2008 MacPro with the latest OS X and I have 2 GTX 970 installed. I needed to wait till NVIDIA delivered the CUDA and GPU drivers after the OS X update but then everything worked. But that is CUDA not openCL. I rather have some UI glitches in Blender with Win7. So my experience sofar was rather stable than problematic.
I am really curious what Apple will do because openCL is something they advertise so much with their new MacPro.
But then there is Metal and I am not sure if openCL seemed to slow down because they internally work on something different:
The Apple openCL webpage only list Mavericks as the last OS X in featured documents.
My impression is that Apple will probably throw their hat in the ring with Vulkan support and in typical Apple fashion will abandon older version support of OpenGL altogether or let it languish into obscurity.
Iām not on twitter, donāt use it, Iām not going to read through Tonās history to validate an article which Iām straying to the side of they are likely not making **** up in this case but Ton acknowledges there is a problem:
https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/594896811501998080
While apples support of 3rd party gpuās is known, itās hardly a new thing. The last 3rd party driver they bundled with the OS was for the GTX 680, and that was more or less eons ago. However all current nvidia cards including the titan x work just fine with blender (I have 4 evga 970 variants in two different 5.1 Mac pros, and they work fine.
Iād like to see a link showing where one of the blender revs said theyāre abandoning Mac OS in its full context, because until then Iām filing that under incendiary trolling.
- Other topics
- Our very active OS X platform maintainer for many years, Jens Verwiebe - had a
suprising statement. Heās going to abandon OS X as a serious 3D/graphics development
platform. This, he said, because of lack of quality GPU support (OpenGL, OpenCL)
and annoying Yosemite glitches. It makes this platform too painful to keep using seriously.
Jens will stay around for at least the 2.75 release. Martijn Berger volunteered to
take over duties.
Thanks,
-Ton-
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2015-May/045367.html
Citing Ton who cites one persons opinion is a perfect way to generalize everything.
Pretty much but my dad said so approach ā¦
As Windows is known for Microsoft putting a lot of focus onto openGL ā¦
The problem I am seeing is that a lot of mac users are tying their use of that OS to personal identity or rather theres some emotional attachment. When I see Michalis respond that way, its not surprising. We are seeing it over on the Modo forums as well (hidden sub forum) because Macs are not working well with Modo either. The developers are at a loss as to what to do.
Its not a joke when people, especially those who put the 3d work over OS based brand loyalty, say āmac is not a viable 3d platformā and it is a tiny part of their market and Apple quite frankly doesnt care. Its odd when I see open source proponents defend apple, which is one of the most closed source companies out there. Whats worse, they dont even want to play nice with anyone else if they can avoid it. Steve Jobs hated flash, so he made sure it wasnt supported on some of his products. Now we are seeing Apple pushing their own API (METAL)ā¦ further more their biggest money makers seem to be tied to mobile. There is no incentive for them to be 3D friendly.
While they are off showcasing a watch, Microsoft has been pushing VR/Hololense promoting 3d asset creation and business. This is the reality we have to live with.
Apple is not a smart platform to be on if you even care one bit about 3D. Sooner or later you will have to jump off the brand loyalty ( brand thats not loyal back) train if you care about the field of CGI or even open source development. At a local vfx studio which I will not name, they are pretty big thoughā¦ all their 3d people use PC and Linux, even the compositors (nuke used on macs) are starting to switch or look into switching when the next upgrade phase happens. There is a reason for this, and the writing is on the wall at this point.
Apple is a hostile platform for this area of development, its a fact. Windows 10 is aiming to be the opposite, with their OS built to be friendly with both android and ios apps on top of a very open development driven platform. One company doesnt give a crap about you or the development end, the other does and is trying to make it as friendly and easy as possible. If you cant reward that, and you care about the field itselfā¦then your priorities are a bit messed up. I get it though, its hard to leave the comfort zone, but you are doing yourself no favors by continuing to support bad business decisions from Apple.
2cents
It would be great if they at least were pushing to Mac OS as well, because when facing the choice between buggy OpenGL and reliable Metal, every sane developer would choose Metal. As it is, thereās no announcement for Metal (or Vulkan) on Mac OS. The fact that the API is proprietary really doesnāt matter.
I think thats the natural evolution of it though, their long term goal if you will. This is Apple we are talking about here, their behavior is somewhat predictable on things, especially when the word āproprietaryā enters the equation.
It makes much more sense on mobile because low driver overhead is very important and they are also doing more-and-more chip design themselves. Mobile GPUs are also different, there is some stuff in Metal (fetching framebuffer data) that doesnāt work on desktop GPUs.
APIs like Mantle and Metal are answers to problems that are supposed to be addressed by Vulkan, so if anything I would expect Apple to support Vulkan on the desktop. It would also make sense considering that Vulkan is basically the offspring of Mantle and that Apple is moving more towards AMDās GCN.
I donāt see what benefit Apple could expect from pushing a proprietary graphics API, so long as thereās an open standard that solves the problem just as well. Apple always uses open (source) technologies when it makes sense.
OpenCL was a gun the Apple pointed at NVIDIA head with the purpose of obtaining better deals and to make NVIDIA realize that they might not be the only game in town. Now that the purpose has been accomplished, Apple has merrily thrown OpenCL under the bus and switched its focus to Metal, which, dear BeerBaron, is another walled garden to keep users and developers captive. Vulkan will end in the same way as OpenCL.
When dealing with Apple, you have to follow the Apple way; in any other context, follow the specific 3200lb gorilla (Intel/NVIDIA/Microsoft). If you still insist in being āfreeā please donāt complain when you will experience on your skin that āfreedomā rhymes with loneliness.
P.S.: get the latest DAZ Studio version which bundles Iray; as Major Chipp Hazard said āEverything else is just a toy!ā
the new macbook comes with an amd 370m gpu. is that not going to require a new driver?
Appleās drivers are provide as part of the OS, I believe. So unless they get off of their asses and fix the problem at its source, then no, the new macs wonāt solve the issues either.