It really makes no sense for an open source project to support a walled garden closed system just because it’s popular. Of course is Apple wants to sponsor it or do it themselves, nothing wrong with that.
Open standards is how free software should work. Not a corporate dictatorship.
Given how hostile Apple is for their customers to be able to upgrade or repair their systems that they paid a lot of money for. Given how software can just suddenly stop working if Apple doesn’t like it or has issues with their servers–I don’t really understand how people can be so positive.
None of this makes any sense. I’m literally using Blender on a Mac right now, and can run any program that runs on MacOS. Never bumped into this “Walled Garden” people keep talking about.
What? None of this is true. How in the world is Apple going to keep me from downloading and using Blender on my Mac, if they wanted that?
Lol, just scanning a couple of those post and it’s mostly a bunch of “sky is falling” talk like, “if Apple ever decides to do X then we are all doomed.” Which for the past 20 plus years you can run any program you want to on MacOS, just like any other OS
Same goes for pretty much any OS. If said code writers decide to flip a switch to not allow something then it would be so. Windows, Linux, or MacOS.
While I’m not sure about cuda, I think Optix was sponsored or developed by Nvidia, and if you read ambi’s earlier post, he said there’s nothing wrong with Blender supporting something like Metal if Apple sponsors it. I agree with the sentiment that Blender should not devote too much of its resources to supporting closed systems, unless, in the case of Metal it becomes relatively trivial after the Vulkan work is done.
so far we only know that the performance is good compared to other mobile systems. they first have to proof that the successor of the m1 will also be good for imacs and mac pros.
especially the 16gb memory limit is concerning. if the ram has to be on the cpu package for reaching the performance numbers how will they do it if somebody needs 128gb ram or more? and what will the prices be? 8gb ram costs like 25€ at the moment but apple takes 200€ for the 8gb to 16gb upgrade.
OptiX was written directly by Nvidia as I understand it. Not by open source volunteers.
Generally I think it’s a really bad idea to demand unpaid volunteers unrelated to a company to write code into their software that implements a proprietary technology for that company. Maybe others disagree, but I don’t really see what’s the logic there.
Let’s differentiate a little to make it possible to have a discussion.
Metal is a combination of a graphics API like OpenGL and a computational API like OpenCL/CUDA. Vulkan is somewhat similar to Metal, but as far as I understand, it isn’t as strong on the computational API side. The Blender Foundation is going to use Vulkan’s graphics API to draw the viewport and UI. On the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that the most significant DaVinci Resolve improvements have been achieved because of the computational API part of Metal.
In general, let’s not talk about actual marketing numbers, because the world of marketing is always simpler and shinier than the real world. Up to 5x improvement in that context can also mean they rewrote some functions which were previously executed on the CPU with an unoptimized implementation and have ported it to Metal and now that one is 5 times faster in their benchmark.
Now, when it comes to the graphics API, both Metal and Vulkan bring some improvements, but they are not that huge in most practical cases. Of course, by using MoltenVK instead of Metal directly, we have to expect slightly worse performance. From my point of view, having Blender use Metal’s graphics API directly, would likely just be slightly faster than MoltenVK, while being a significant investment.
Edit: For the sake of completeness, I should mention that there are no plans to bring Cycles to Metal. As it stands, when rendering using Cycles, only the usual CPU functionality would be used on Mac. There are also no workarounds planned as in the case of the graphics API where MoltenVK can be used.
Good talk everyone and great points on both sides.
A few things I just want to make clear:
-I’m not asking for the halt of Vulcan support for Blender.
-I’m not asking for a Metal version of Blender to be completed before a Vulcan version; I’m an animator and my patience in life is built in. If the BF said they decided to work on a Metal version, but It would be ready for another 5-6 years, that would be good enough for me. Apple Silicon may only be at it’s mature state then.
@DeepBlender great points, and I am taking the marketing numbers with a grain of salt, but I am also using them to show that these companies are getting improvements. And regardless of if it’s from M1 alone or a combination of the M1, code clean up, and new instructions, it is still happening. But yes, I’m being conservative with my ideas.
And yes, good assumption; I too am talking about core Blender using Metal for things like view port draws and such. Having Cycles run on Metal would be an added bonus, but there are a few Metal renders, that are compatible with Blender, out there now. So rendering with Metal is already here now.
This is a message from Apple meaning “you cannot use our machines for development anymore.” aka “losing developer consensus”
That means in a not-so-short time that switch you said will be flipped and you’ll have to develop that no-more-working software by yourself. Literally.
You could start with… let’s see… translating every Cycle open gl shader into Metal, for instance…
It’a always all this doom and gloom talk when it comes to Apple, but I think most of the fears of being locked out are unfounded and make no sense from the part of Apple – both financially and logistically.
Apple is well aware that 3rd party development is key. They have invested heavily into Maxon/Redshift and OTOY and the results of those efforts are now here.
Unfortunately Blender is still the red-headed stepchild of the CG world. It’s still far from being an industry standard, and its open-source nature can be difficult to navigate for companies who are not only for-profit, but looking to protect their IP fiercely.
The fact that Blender was even mentioned in this past WWDC is IMHO a major nod to how many strides Blender has made in the industry. Apple is obviously quite aware of the Blender development and I think they fully understand that bringing Blender into full ARM/Metal compliance is something that needs to happen at some point in the future.
My guess is that it’s just a matter of time before Apple devotes the same type of effort in Blender as they have with C4D and Houdini.
I’m a Mac user since the times of the Macintosh SE/30, so I guess I might be considered a Mac diehard (rather diesoft, lately, but…) and still find Linus’ channel fun and valuable regarding Macs because he reasons his opinions and is able to correct himself when wrong
But the majority of blender users are on Windows. Have you ever watched the network traffic of a Windows machine? And please give me one example, where Apple blocks users from running code on their systems. If you talking about un-notarized apps… Just disable the protection – done. And if you don’t like Apple at all, don’t use Apple products and stop complaining.
If the BF said they decided to work on a Metal version, but It would be ready for another 5-6 years, that would be good enough for me. Apple Silicon may only be at it’s mature state then.
