I did just that in the “Eevee is better than you (may) think” thread. It’s probably the better place to discuss this, since it’s more on topic.
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I got impress about the M1 chip and blender review you did in YouTube. And searching all the info found this threat, your explanations are very good and realistic. Yes!, lot of info in this threat.
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Just by curiosity, what graphic card will be similar to the M1 performance with blender? Like the 1050ti or?
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Do you mean overall viewport performance?
from what ive heard its between a 1050 and a 1050ti,
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Thank you for the Link!
Krita is M1 ready now too
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HA…I was just about to post the exact same article. I really hope that Blender devs are looking into the M1 and hopefully stop dismissing Apple as a whole out of spite.
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Hope they do, considering the only thing that’s keeping me from buying a Mac at this point is Blender’s lacking features over there.
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Saying this nicely, I don’t think their doing out of spite; some of the developers seem genuinely interested in the OS.
I think it comes down to time and resources.
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Which features are lacking when you’re using Blender on macOS at the moment? Are you referring to Cycles being restricted to CPU rendering, or are there more things that don’t work in Blender macOS?
It’s the lack of Optix, Cuda, and the Apple equivalent thereof. I don’t do much rendering in Cycles, but if I’m going to drop over $2 grand on a new machine, I like knowing it’ll at least be more capable than what I have now.
The M1 chips are impressive, no doubt, and I imagine that the upcoming M1X chips will be even moreso, but as long as there are caveats to consider, I’ll be reticent about pulling the trigger on getting a Mac.
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I still don’t understand. Why still is not supported and optimized for Mac?. Cos is a free software? I think there is some type of “I DONT LIKE YOU” situation there, more than, we have no founding to make possible the solution for the user of the software no matter what OS uses.
What would you like to see?
Just to be fair, it is GPL licenced software, not free software and despite it being ethically unclear that proprietary frameworks should be supported to the detriment of open source, free to use binaries are provided for proprietary OSs…
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It’s important to keep in mind how much extra effort would be necessary to maintain a separate version of Blender that’s targeted at Apple’s specific libraries, particularly Metal. Blender has OpenGL calls spread throughout its code. OpenGL is still supported by Windows and Linux, but not by Apple (it works, but it’s not updated anymore). It might be a bit easier when it comes to Cycles, but I guess it would still require a dedicated developer to maintain a separate Metal version of Cycles for macOS, as OpenCL is also not supported anymore by Apple. Looking at the small percentage of Blender users that are on macOS, I guess it’s a matter of the cons outweighing the pros for the Blender Foundation.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m anticipating a return to macOS and would definitely love to see more Blender love for that OS. The solution will be a Metal wrapper for Vulkan, as Blender has a long-term goal of switching from OpenGL to Vulkan. In the mean time I’ll be looking at Octane X for fast rendering when I’ve switched back to macOS, and hope that Eevee will soon get native screen space GI.
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Which part? The vast majority of Blender works and runs on macOS/M1 just fine, for the most part even faster than on previous generation Apple hardware.
Or are you talking about Metal support? That is not asking for optimisation, that is asking for a brand new from the ground up written feature, and that hasn’t happened yet because…
…because it’s a sh*t ton of work. It’s a lot of work, and we can all scream that somebody should finally be doing it. But until we have that certain somebody, screaming isn’t going to help.
Now, before there comes the inevitable “We’re a lot of Mac users, and we’re giving money to the BF, why don’t they do what so many of their users want”? - We’re not. We’re not a lot of Mac users.
To my knowledge, my M1 builds of 2.92 are the only published Apple Silicon builds of Blender, so you’d think that quite a few Blender users with brand new Macs would use them. How may users have downloaded that build by now? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Far from it. The web page for my 2.92.0 release has had a total of 76 unique visitors. Seventy-six.
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I can agree that “We’re not a lot of Mac users” and many, many thanks for your native Blender version.
On the other hand, access to your version can be difficult and I think many Blender users don’t even know it exists. Even if someone ends up on your Github page, they may have trouble finding and installing the right files. This is not an accusation - after all this is just a test version.
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