has anyone tried this ?
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QrYAd8
seems there is some interesting stuff out there…
Also…
If anyone is interested to try it some more Volumetric Shaders now work in Blender 3 with Cycles X 
Well sometimes I managed to make it crash when trying some volumetric fog.
Looks like Unreal Engine is rolling out some great features. Anyone tried it on M1? How did it perform?
I’m now thinking of going with a Razer RTX would be better than waiting for this Macs, does M1 have ray tracing? I know Apple said they have, but after doing some search, it seemed there was nothing, no software have implemented it 
how good is ray tracing actually?
Info can be found here:
RTX 2070 (DirectX Ray Tracing) - 63.8 FPS - 362 MRay/s
Apple M1 (Metal) - 2.06 FPS - 11.7 MRay/s
As far as I know the M1 iGPU does not have hardware ray tracing and it shows, so adding GPU cores is not going to improve Metal performance drastically.
CAUTION: Random benchmark from the internets for my dGPU…
that looks really bad. No one seemed to be looking at this?
I think Apple actually claimed that M1 has raytracing but probably veryweak
Jules Urbach (OTOY):
you can roughly get 7 to 8 OB per GPU core on M1 without RTX - so current M1 has 7 - 8 cores for 50 to 64 OB - and a rumored 64 gpu core high end 64 GB SoC would be 8x that - so the math says maybe up to 500 OB - again with RTX off. If they ever get to a 128 core GPU as rumored we’d be 800-1000 OB, and maybe even more if/ when they add hardware RT. Then the highest end SoC may also get 128 GB VRAM.
And how good is that? Compared to RTX, can it be used in Blender?
Blender OctaneX free version (for 1 GPU) is available at:
https://render.otoy.com/shop/primex.php
I personally don’t use the OctaneX at the moment. I’m waiting for the final version and a faster GPU from Apple - probably in 2022.
No. Metal must first be built into Blender. We don’t know if that will ever happen.
That’s not true.
Metal probably will come with Cycles X, they kinda hinted at it.
I am guessing the next 6 month will tell…
Which is ok as Apple will have better GPUs then too.
Apple will need to include hardware ray tracing acceleration in the new silicon to compete, because even at 8x the performance, the RTX 2070 is still nearly 7x as fast at ray tracing specific tasks, however, I am sure with Apple is planning either to licence or buy a suitable core design to integrate into their SOCs, especially as hardware ray tracing is seeing traction in SOCs for games. The Apple GPUs already contain silicon dedicated to AI accelerated tasks.
I am sure they’ll add hardware raytracing but I think they will never buy a licence for an existing solution - Apple will create their own solution.
what you guys forget is that you cannot just build a cpu/gpu/soc in any size you desire, otherwise companies would already do it … theres a size limit for a chip …
What Apple really needs is to enable eGPU on those new machines. There really isn’t any other way around it, and that 128GPU cores M-whatever machine will probably cost $10k+ which isn’t feasible for most working artists.
We do not forget. We know that 128-core GPU is not possible. We simply believe in Apple magic.
Metal has an implementation of accelerated software ray-tracing. Although its accelerated by processes in the gpu, and therefore is faster than plain tracing, its still much slower than a dedicated gpu with hardware cores that deal specifically with ray tracing
A great paper I saw on this earlier was https://www.willusher.io/graphics/2020/12/20/rt-dive-m1. Note that metal only supports inline ray tracing while other apis, such as directx, have both inline and ray tracing pipelines, which can be used to implement standalone ray tracing renderers (e.g. cycles).
This acceleration is similar to Embree used for accelerating cpu rendering on apple silicon on blender m1 (specifically Embree-aarch64, Embree itself is developed by intel for intel at the moment, although aarch64 is coming soon)
The Apple Developer Ecosystem Engineering team actually updated the aarch64 port a while back to implement AVX2, which provides several improvements in ray-tracing acceleration.
can it [metal] be used in Blender?
At the moment, no*
*(more on octane x later)
That’s not true.
Sadly it is. Applications like blender have to made with an API in mind. Blender at the moment uses openGL and openCL I believe. On windows, it can also utilize DirectX. There are plugins that offer metal rendering (e.g. octane x) but when people refer to “blender rendering” they usually mean either cycles or eevee. OctaneX + Octane Server is essentially the octane renderer with blender as a fancy gui.
Some apis (such as Vulcan) can translate to metal (moltenVK) but in the future they will most likely have proper metal rendering in the Cycles X engine
128GPU cores M-whatever machine will probably cost $10k+ which isn’t feasible for most working artists.
Not to mention that it would likely thermal throttle anyways. When you turn up the gpu and cpu at the same time even the m1 MacBook Pro can get toasty. Something with the 16 times the cores isn’t going to fare very well, even in a 16 inch chassis