Me too. 
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itās very likely that there will be a metal version of cycles. thatās ājustā another backend. there also are statements by the developers about that.
itās very unlikely that the rest of blender will use metal directly. so eevee and the gui will use moltenvk.
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Letās hope it happens before we die or we all jump to C4D in desperation.
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Intel just announced the Thunderbolt conference for developers for November 1st ā 5th. Maybe itās a coincidence, or maybe Thunderbolt 5 (80Gbps) is headed to Mac M1X?
I donāt really get Thunderbolt honestly. Itās an expensive technology that utterly failed to gain traction in the decade that itās been around. I see it as the Firewire of this generation. Everything about Thunderbolt is way too expensive compared to USB 3.1 from cables to enclosures and interfaces. The only useful aspect of it seems to be for eGPU as itās total overkill for drives and other interfaces. Someone needs to explain to me why Apple and Intel are still heavily committed to this technology.
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Thunderbolt is PCIe over external cable. It is the fastest and most versatile interface in a consumer world.
For example ā I have Akitio Thunderbolt Dock Pro connected to my MacBook Air. This way with only one cable I have: 4K monitor, 10Gb Ethernet connection to PC shit, external Thunderbolt superfast SSD, a couple of different USB devices (HDD, RAID HDD, printer). There are eSATA, Compact Flash and SD slots. MBA sucks the power from Akitio dock of course.
I still have one Thunderbolt port free in my MBA - it is waiting for eGPU (please Apple, have mercyā¦)
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Not just about speed. And Thunderbolt 4 works with any display tech you need to mount. Thunderbolt is where the āOne port to rule them allā was born from.
Unfortunately, users think they need a dongle for each port not knowing the bandwidth left on a port after plugging in only one device. You can drive a Thunderbolt 4 hub off one TB4 port on a Mac and have plenty a bandwidth left to run all of the hubās other available ports at max capacity. People wrongly think each device needs its own TB4 port.
You canāt use that DisplayPort on your PC to drive multiple external drives plus multiple 5K display from a single portā¦ Thunderbolt 4 can.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/what-is-thunderbolt-4-why-this-new-interface-will-matter-in-pcs-in-2021
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Also if you work in the audio production world, what used to be PCI-e cards has now mostly been moved to Thunderbolt audio interfaces on the higher end. USB-C/A usually in the mid tier area. The audio interface industry has embraced TB ever since the first iteration was released even if it was Mac only at the time. USB4 is basically going to be TB3 with some added functionality/protocols. However I donāt expect there to be much push for TB5.
Appleās platform was the main driver for TB and Apple seems to be happy with USB4/TB4 for now. Especially since they can implement it into their own SoC without much input from Intel. So I suspect TB5 will fall flat on its face for the moment unless Intel gets uptake with very little barrier to entry for OEMs.
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It has been clear in this thread, MacUser want Blender.
If you give me permission, I will try to encourage Apple to support Blender.
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Just embrace Octane. It has native Metal support, itās versatile, fast and looks great. If you use lightweight settings itās not much slower than Eevee, and still looks better than an average Cycles rendering. Octane has become my go-to renderer. Although I own Keyshot, I still prefer Octane.
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Iāve tried it and itās not bad at all itās just that itās such a hassle to get a scene into the stand alone version.
For the the Blender version and M1 itās running through Rosetta which isnāt a big deal as weāve discussed before.
The free single GPU Blender version isnāt free for M1 users for some reason 
Issues that drove me back to Cycles: Every other day it would require me to log back in but Octane servers would say another computer was already logged in to Octane Servers even though I was us just using my M1ā¦ I would have to email Otoy wait three days for a response and a reset; then rinse and repeat. Would get to use the Blender version maybe 3 times every two weeks because of the issue.
Huge PITA.
Cycles and even more so Eevee is just so much more convenient, and on a current Blender version.
Not a big deal cause render speed and renders arenāt really a big concern for me. 
Iām just hopeful for full Metal support in the future, but Iām patient.
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I tried Octane X countless times. As CookItOff mentioned there are constantly login issues and you can unlock your computer only a few times. Octane Serverās stability is still bad enough that using Octane X doesnāt make sense to me. Blender Octane X is still only in the x86 version, and the last update is from June. I payed Octane X licence for couple of months and from my point of view it was waste of time and money. My impression is that OTOY does not take Octane X very seriously (at least Blender version), so why should I take Octane X seriously? Perhaps they lack the resources to effectively handle all versions of Octane and work on other projects (such as Brigade) at the same time. I donāt know, but this is all extremely unprofessional.
Another thing is that we have to wait at least until next year for hardware with processors from Apple that are suitable for raytracing. I donāt want to go back to Intel on my Mac.
For now, I work in hybrid mode:
Itās certainly not perfect, and sometimes itās annoying, but somehow it works.
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@anon55679826 , @anon80315389 Thanks for the info, I didnāt know that Octane X has such drawbacks. Iām sorry to read that, as I was counting on Octane X for a smooth transition to an Apple Silicon iMac. 
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I think your comment should be read by someone at OTOY and Apple.
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How about LuxCore for macOS? Does anyone use it, and does it perform well? I love LuxCoreās look a lot too.
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I havenāt tried LuxCore yet, but Iāve tried AMDās Pro Render last year and it worked fine, and it supports Metal. Not Sure if it has M1 support yet.
I stopped using Pro Render because I mostly render animations and at the time there wasnāt a way to adjust the seeding value for the noise, which if youāve ever rendered animations with camera movement in Blender without ticking that box your noise becomes static (motionless) and very noticeable.
Not sure if thatās fixed yet.
Cycles also allows me to render on servers easier because of its native implementation. And thatās how I mostly render longer animations.
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Everytime I look at Octane I feel confused again and lost in the UI.
Maybe however I should sit down one weekend and work more with it again.
Do you render to Octane from Blender @Metin_Seven ?
I have used Octane in the past on other platforms, and did give it a proper try in Blender. IMHO OTOY is the type of company who fundamentally have something really good on their hands, but which they choose to hamper with stupid small issues that could be easily addressed if they just took the time (and maybe backed off the accelerator pedal a bit). Things like the aforementioned clunky login/license issues, the extremely confusing nomenclature for all their versions, even the subscription tiers can be confusing!
My experience with Octane X in Blender was a real lag issue for the viewport to update. In my experience, every small little tweak meant up to a minute of refresh before Octane would display the updated results. I should clarify that I was working on my Intel Hackintosh with a 5700XT GPU and not on the M1, which I did try but simply couldnāt push quite as hard.
I have also tested Octane X in Houdini, and there the implementation is better and more performant, yet they still opted for some dubious choices in their interfacing with the host app.
Juanjo weirdly (and IMHO has a conflict on interest here) is the guy in charge for both Octane and Redshiftās Houdini plugins. Iām sure heās a very smart guy, but some of his choices and priorities leave a lot to be desired and heās part of the reason why I eventually abandoned Redshift.
Overall I feel that Octane is a great looking render engine (the best looking GPU renderer IMHO) that is hampered by these small things that make it an utterly frustrating experience. Coupled with the impossibly high cost of GPUās at the moment, and the fact that Cycles and EEVEE are so much better integrated with Blender, I came to the conclusion that Octane was not right for me.
For anyone interested in trying Octane X, I would highly recommend running at least a couple of 6800XTās in order to feel like youāre actually seeing a gain in render performance. On a single 5700XT the performance was honestly not any better than Cycles, but with all the limitations and above-mentioned issues of a GPU renderer.
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@Midphase very thorough, thanks for the heads up on the other issues.
I didnāt want to sound like the typical āI really wanted to like thisā post, I always hate those.
Saying that, 
I want to Octane X to succeed and be awesome, because itās one of the premier renderers supporting Metal implementation, itās just so damn frustrating to even get it workingā¦ Iām fine with the UI differences.
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