Mac: M3 - *Hardware accelerated RT (Part 1)

So the math is easily done.
Have a mid-sized developer from London (a market I know the prices of) specialised in 3D graphics, on Open GL, and C/C++. Then it must be apt at Apple low-level code (Metal) and all apple things. Double career.
Let’s say we have a bargain, because the port has to be mantained over the years, for as long as Apple decides to move Metal forward. At Apple’s pace, it means practically forever (But I may be wrong here, with some luck).
Anyway at least 3 years of development to be sure. Given the “long” range and upper side of the main street (an interesting and eventually profitable thing) we agree with him/her/theirs for about 80K per year (all inclusive)
So it’s 80K x 3 years = 240.000 pounds for starters, by 76 = 3,157 and so pounds per person.
So, in the end, our Macs are going to cost their normal price tag plus ca. 3,000 pounds more for having our favourite software running on it. :thinking:
Not a problem, I guess. Mac people are rich.

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Only 3,000! Thats a steal for a software 76 people downloaded

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Well, yeah. How else would the marketing behind a $1000 monitor stand make sense?

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First of all, that supposes that all Blender M1 OS X users are aware of it, and I assure you they’re not and even I have decided to stick with the regular Blender build since it runs so well on my M1. In addition, M1 Macs are relatively new, like only a handful of months new. Compared to the installed Apple users base, people who own M1’s are still a relatively teeny tiny percentage. However give it another year that percentage will be quite larger as many Mac users consider updating their aging machines.

The real question is how many individual downloads of all Blender builds are made by Mac users? That is the real number to keep in mind, as sooner of later the majority of that number will be using ARM cpu’s.

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We don’t know how many Blender users exist and we don’t know how many are using which platform. We don’t know whether we get a reasonable idea when looking at the download numbers. So…

We may not be the largest user group of Blender,
but we M1 users are the loudest …

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Windows has a 72% market share in cad compared to the 13% of macOS for CAD software. If I had the choice to spend money on developing and running blender on Vulcan and windows api’s, or metal, I would definitely put more money towards windows

And you need to remember that right now, Apple Silicon Macs are probably less then 10% of that 13%, so it makes sense if its not top priority.

Of course blender may be different, but the results should be largely similar

Blender already has linux arm builds, its just that the depencies for apple silicon and macOS are very different to those of windows and linux.

Apple still allows you to download apps. straight from the web and not the Mac store.

For now at least, but reports are that Apple has now hid the option to do so by default. What happens next is anyone’s guess, as we are talking about the company that created the world’s first and only computing platform where FOSS is banned.

If they would like to dongle Macs to App Store,
there would not have been any need to state at WWDC that
“Macs are different, and will always run any Software from the web”

But of course, a Company that has no problem to neglect Mac Pro Users
from 2012 until 2019 (for more than ridiculous prices), for nearly a decade,
I would not bet that they will lock everything down to App Store only a year later.
Maybe even Subsription only (ahm … in App purchase).

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I would like to quickly point out that they didnt “hide” the option, just made it more annoying for unsigned/unnotarized code to install. Its just an extra click away, but definitely not hidden

For most popular apps, like chrome, you can just install it normally

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Probably I am terribly wrong but let’s assume there are 2400 active Blender Mac users whole world which would be happy to pay for full Blender Metal version (including Cycles and Eevee) - not only M1 version but every Mac which supports Metal. According to your estimates it would mean £100 per user.

I am a poor freelancer but I’d happy to pay £500 for such Blender Metal version.
Hell, I’d pay £500 (+ e.g. £100 per year for updates) just for Metal Cycles if it would support the RX6x00 cards with raytracing. Such a version would have to hit the App Store to sell well. There are commercial Cycles forks so probably Metal Cycles could be placed in App Store. Similarly with Eevee - the Metal version could be blazing fast in multi GPU setups.

Yes, I know - dream on…

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I am not sure if this is about funding or more about also having the developer for Ton and make sure once they lets say would start on Metal to keep the / a person being able to continue the work.

Look at other FOS projects where the mac build froze because the devs moved on.

Right now but not in some years. People now know Intel Macs are done. Period. And the MacPro 2012 I have with NVIDIA GPUs is not much faster in CPU than the M1 MacMini !!!
GPU is still a sticking point but that will change anyway.

So honestly with the SoC decision Apple also provided clarity.

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As far as I know there are no plans for any Metal project in BF.
You can’t chain a developer to Blender code. I am talking of commercial project where the developer(s) would earn a disgusting amount of money when working on an groundbreaking project and has no reason to move on.

In that case, I think, that best bet would be to switch to commercial app, like C4D.

This is a last resort. I personally switched from commercial app (Maya) because Blender suited me better. I have a tons of Blender projects in my archive, there is no Eevee (which I use whenever possible) in other apps, etc, etc.

Yeah, EEVEE is the Blender’s “killer app”, if it wasn’t for EEVEE I’d be sticking with Houdini which is pretty much superior in every other way. I have it on good word that Houdini is working on an Apple ARM version update, but unlike BF they tend to be fairly silent on their future plans so no word on when it’ll happen.

What could get me to jump right back into Houdini is if they somehow managed to implement a real time Unreal Engine render inside Houdini. Since Epic basically bought half of SideFX, the possibility isn’t unlikely, but I’m not holding my breath. Plus I still feel that in many ways EEVEE is superior to Unreal look-wise, with a more film-centric pipeline and a much more industry-standard workflow than Unreal has.

If Eevee had parallax occlusion maps, and dynamic LODs, they’d be fairly evenly matched as far as looks and features go.

I am not so sure - Unreal seems to be quite ahead in few areas and consider how much it is being used. I judge this by the use in architecture viz for example.

To my understanding the GI setup there is quite running circles around Blenders irradiance volume tool.

You can get roughly the same results from Blender’s irradiance volumes as you can from Unreal’s GI tools, though it’s much more difficult to set up.