One thing I always forget about 3D viewport performance: display resolution. Lowering it increases performance a lot.
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I was set on buying the Macbook Pro 16, but then I realized that Apple had made it non-upgradable. I cant afford to buy a fully specced Macbook Pro 16, so now I will probably buy a PC. I am considering the MSI GS65 Stealth RTX2070. I really like using my old 2010 macbook pro so its a shame the I would have to switch away from MacOS. But maybe its for the better. I will probably have better performance with the rtx2070 and for a lower price.
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I just returned a very well specced MBP 16. It felt … wrong. The sharp edge under my arms, the huge size (I had the 13 inch before), and the constant feeling that I’ll have to handle it with extreme caution were irritating. I mean it is a great machine, but I felt it was too big and way too expensive. The idea was to use it as my main device and maybe sell the HP tower, but with Blender’s performance on Macs after 2.8 it felt wrong, too.
Looking at some nice 14 inch Lenovos now, with user serviceable SSDs, batteries and RAM. Maybe just with a quad core CPU as opposed to the Mac’s six cores, but I have a tower for heavy lifting anyway.
Tried using 2.82 beta with Mac Os?
I’ve seen improvements with it…
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Oh and if there is an easy way to improve viewport performance on the MBP 16 with Catalina please share them here
In 2.80 and 2.81 Blender does not activate the GPU when dynamic graphics switching is active, which it is by default (T71342), this might have been the problem? This has been fixed in 2.82, and with the GPU enabled I have had nothing but excellent viewport performance.
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Hi guys,my toddler poured his water cup over my 2013 macbook pro lol not good, I picked up the new 16 inch macbook pro last week this is where we are…using Blender 2.8a… my specs are pretty good though more than what i was originally going for…19 2.4 with 8 cores, 32 Ram, and 8 gig Amd graphics…
Eevee works great and is smooth, in my 2013 had issues when i turned on
screen space reflections which put it into a crawl… Cycles works fine but is CPU only does not utilise the GPU due to Apple’s metal encoding, hopefully this will get sorted out in the future, by either Blender devs or even apple or both…
In summary,pleased with the speed of Eevee, expected cycles to work as it does still pretty fast, dissapoinyted that 8 gb of graphics card at the moment going to waste …yes, but still to download 2.82 so might be better. but at the minute everything is decent
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Maybe an eGPU and and AMD card could help when using AMD Radeon ProRender.
CUDA will never comeback to macOS or install Windows10 and dual-boot.
As others have said: https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender-downloads we put a new fix release up today.
hey blenderrocket!
I’m a bit of a newbie, so I don’t know much about settings in blender.
Could you help me out to tweak my blender to work better in my MBP 16? specially my viewport.
I’d really appreciate it!
If you are using Blender 2.82 it should work fine out of the box. Are you experiencing any specific problems?
Do you know when they’re going to add support for metal? I am really thinking about downgrading my MacOS to be able to use my GPU. But it is never great to be not up to date with Apple products. hahaha
Well, Apple is not really encouraging and being helpful with downgrading. 
So I fully understand your hesitation.
I don’t think Cycles will get metal support anytime soon, unfortunately. But it seems like the metal version of Octane is already in beta testing. So it could be out this summer.
Looking forward to it…
Keep your finger crossed. Nobody told these guys that it is impossible, so maybe dreams come true:
In a mean time I personally use a very dirty solution:
https://blenderartists.org/t/nvidia-gtx-rtx-for-macos-catalina
Hi,
“Blender only runs at full speed under Windows and Linux.”
I totally disagree:
- Mac OS is built on top BSD, the fastest and most stable of UNIX universe.
- Heavy scene are more stable e responsive on OSX due to is swap and paging solutions, this means you have more freeze on Win with same scene (even with more powerfull HW)
Thanks
Hi. Does anyone know how the MacBook Pro 16 with AMD Radeon Pro 5500M running on windows, performs against Dell XPS 15 GTX 1650 TI?
I work with the same hardware in both OS and I cannot say that Win is faster.
The only issue I see recently is that in eeVee some openGL parts dont work on MacOS !!!