Seems that you do not realise after all that Apple, AMD and Intel pay their own developers to work on Blender. 
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Thanks for the comparison shots ! the limitation with multiple occluders is a big one. Also the shadow softness doesn’t seem to match Cycles very well, they look somewhat sharper in EEVEE-next. From what I understand they’re considering adding different methods to handle the cases that shadow tracing fails at. Will it handle the fallback automagically, I wonder ?
There are artefacts on wall on top of box right?
Are those entirely same setups? There are some differences like in Eevee suzanne has highight on screen left cheek, and in Eevee Next she has shadow in the exact place. Do they calculate lights differently?
Also, if that’s soft shadow, can you make a comparison with harsh shadows in Eevee Next?
I’m aware. Do they push also push commits to Main without any involvement or oversight from the BF team?
Of course not, but I don’t see a problem there either. If this would be an argument against their work, than no other than blender devs with commit rights should contribute to blender. All other developers take away their time, because all code has to be reviewed. Maybe you just should not use open source software 
So please reconcile for us how blender developers working with code from Apple/AMD/IBM developers on Eevee does not add time to Eevee development.
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You clearly do not understand the principals of open source software. 
No further comments to your nonsense will follow from my side. HF
Get on with the times grandpa! Blender doesn’t run on Z Mainframe.
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I guess he meant Intel.
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You guys know that CPU architectures differ from company / product, CPU’s can have different instructions that can change the way a feature might be implemented for specific calculations that might need to be done differently for an other CPU, it’s not so cut and dry in that department as well.
So a software renderer is not really going to solve anything it will also be horribly slow, Moving to Vulkan will be the simplest thing as every GPU supports it and MoltenVK a compatibility layer for Apples Metal, Moving to vulkan will be what unifies everything nicely, as for those other things you guys are talking about like HIP-RT or Optix, CUDA ect those are libraries intended to utilize hardware specific features to boost performance for specific workloads.
Sorry about my little rant just feels like some people are a little confused (Been programming for 16 years 10 professionally)
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Yes, sorry… intel - I don’t believe blender runs on typewriters… yet?
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I understand how a clock and a calendar work.
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It’s an interesting point ! We are all consumers of movies, and therefore got some tastes, and know what we like or how we like things being done in a movie. Fair enough !
Things start to mix up when people think they know what would have been needed to “fix” the movie.
Most of the time it’s quite naive and disconnected from the reality of making movie. Since people might have seen a lot of movies but how many years did they spend on a movie set, or in a VFX house, in a producer’s office or in a writing team.
Needless to say that among professionals people already have a bare idea of what others are doing and what motivates the choices they do, and what consequences that brings to the screen.
It’s the same with blender developments, we might have ideas on how it could be better, but probably only a few of us worked as developer on similar projects, or as a project manager of a project of the size of blender. Since it’s not my job I can’t judge, but I’d say from experiences that when an idea start like “they should have …” it’s quite naive most of the time … But it’s fun to do such statements I do it all the time without even noticing that I don’t know what I’m talking about
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I know that everyone hasn’t been paying attention, or even cares if they aren’t Mac users, but the Apple developers have been working almost nonstop for the past two years to rewrite Blender’s backend to Metal for Apple Silicon machines. It’s the same Blender that everyone else uses but it’s NOT the same Blender. The Mac AS version of Blender doesn’t use openGL at all anymore behind the scenes (may be small traces of openGL hanging around), it’s pretty much all Metal from the re-write.
I’m not sure if Molten will be needed at any level for Apple machines, at least not new Apple Silicon Macs.
Even with the Eevee Next patches that pop-up there’s usually a followed patch from one of the Apple developers implementing the same feature but for the Metal version of Blender.
I can say that if Blender gets the same attention with a Vulcan rewrite, then Windows user are going to LOVE it. After the Metal backend was officially turned on (maybe 4-6 months ago) there was a noticeable difference in viewport performance compared to when it was OpenGL. Eevee performance seemed to double on my super lowed-end AS Mac. Next stop for us Mac user is Hardware RT and it looks like that is happening with the M3 machines. There’s already “Metal RT” toggles in the Blender settings.
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I think this is a nice practical example that doing it on the CPU might not fix everything completely: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2020/07/19/silentpatch-mass-effect/ AKA the Mass Effect 1 black blobs that happen only when someone uses a (“modern”?) AMD CPU.
But, getting back on topic… I think I want to post my results too. I was hoping I’d see the massive freezes I had with my A770 in Eevee-next fixed, and I guess they are. I’m sure you will be able to tell which image is regular Eevee though:
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Oh that’s cool, my point was just if your goal was to unify everything moving to a software renderer is pretty extreme with not much benefits and that Vulkan could do that with the added support of Metal with MultenVK, but it’s really awesome that apple is putting in so much work to get everything running natively that’s very impressive!
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Totally agree! I think that day was the most exciting in my digital-work life!
Eevee Next is now the default render engine (no longer experimental).
EEVEE-Next: Move out of experimental options · 4bddbe85f6 - blender - Blender Projects
Start using it tonight when the buildbot updates.
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How feature complete is it by now compared to Cycles? Or is it just bare bones functionality?
I didn’t follow the development but I am curious.