no offense, but the Apple could make the transition less dramatic …
Apple wanted to break everyone’s boxes.
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Hey, I hear ya. The arguments everyone presents here, on the way Apple just straight pulls the plug on support when they do these things, seem very valid.
I just want what’s best for the end users. I’m hoping these companies do too.
the only thing I think is that if there had been Steve Jobs, he wouldn’t have made these shit.
Steve would not have pestered the community of geeks, power users, and developers …
Then maybe I’m out of this environment for a long time and things have changed … but bho … I don’t like it anymore.
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Dropbox recently talked about the real cost of shared code for different platforms. TL;DR it is actually so much work that having separate codebases is the easier approach. Admitted, they talk about code for iOS/Android. So it might be a little far fetched, and I have no idea how this translates to blender development. But it may be a thing to think about. Maybe someone with a good understanding of blender development for different platforms could shed some light here.
Either way, with the Blender fund doing really well the Blender Foundation could allow itself full time macOS development and maintenance. As I understand it, Metal per se isn’t bad, on the contrary. Having an optimized version of Blender on Metal is of course more work, but now there are actually enough resources to get it done.
Apple is certainly not poor …
If it wants to do a good thing, make one of its best Metal developers available to put Metal on Blender … they would gain respect and skills.
Apple could have definitely made the change less dramatic. However, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see OpenGL stay in MacOS for many years to come.
I would LOVE to see Apple drop some funding Blender’s way to produce a Metal back end. It’s not out of the question, considering both Otoy and Redshift are making their renderers metal-compatible seemingly out of nowhere, making me think Apple sponsorship was definitely happening there. Even though Blender was left out of that party, I still find it encouraging that Apple is focusing so heavily on things like 3d performance and compute. This is a very niche market that I thought Apple had long ago abandoned. I just hope blender can benefit from this in some way in the near future.
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Is not bad to talk/speculate. But is sad to read a lot and find zero answers…
Will Blender commit to keeping Mac OS in the bag?
I think that Apple is testing the “remove the standard jack” move by talking about it first to developers. Lucky us, they were very noisy so the official statement is that Open GL will be gone from the OS in some time. Might succeed in a few years or a few after that with more pression from big names. Yet no matter when, it will be much sooner than AMD Patreon, or Blender to take make a move, to show something. For now, we treat it like plastic waste/climate change/world depression/consumerism. We know is there, we will see about it, or we just don’t.
But if one developer, one needs 50k euro/dollars per year to do one job only, keep Blender alive for Mac OS, no new features -> that means if 1k Mac Users would pay 4 euro/dollar per month for several years, we could have the dream of Blender running on Macs. Just like @cartoon.five showed in the article, that 1 user has to write the code again with apple code, so we have to pay also his computer and apple annual developer fee. Still, is less money that Cinema 4D or Maya. Houdini has some interesting fees thou.
But there are no 1k mac users that read this thread, nor 1k mac users to pay because they cannot as they are at school so the discussion is dead.
The majority wants new features, so Mac users, we have to look elsewhere also.
I was making donations, but since 2.8x I stop. So if all Mac users stop making donations (if ever made) then we might just well not have a Blender for Mac OS :))
Blender is a miracle in a sea of sharks and I hope, for the sake of what is beautiful in this world, that he will succeed against the ever-changing technology (that became change for the sake of change)
I dont think this train ever will come back. And while I am fine with Apple doing hard cuts (at work I have to make often transitions too and they are hard but in the end good) the NVIDA CUDA childish argument just is just plain face palm.
metal might be a pretty good platform. A lot of pro apps also use metal already. adoption thus is no issue for the commercial world. still for 3d rendering besides AMD proRender or opencl based luxrender CUDA is just the standard. PERIOD!
Like others I wish apple would help Blender Foundation to push Blender to Metal or Vulcan.
But I hardly think this ever will happen.
They help other commercial apps because financially it is more logical. sadly
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The blender foundation has already confirmed that it will be moving toward vulkan. This means that with 100% certainty, you will be able to run blender on mac OS in the future because moltenVK exists.
The main concern is whether or not the foundation will have finished this work before openGL is completely removed from mac OS. Even if the foundation decided to hire developers to port blender to metal instead of vulkan, it would be the same situation because openGl support could be removed before any sort of work porting blender to either api is finished.
I think most folks hate hearing that they won’t be moving to metal because they assume running vulkan on top of metal will be a huge performance hit or something. Both metal and vulkan are low level apis, so I’m personally skeptical that there will be much of a performance hit.
I bet blender will still be faster using moltenVK than openGL. Then again supposedly performance in a 3d app isn’t the same as performance in a game. We might not see any speed ups or regressions after they change the api.
The other issue is cycles gpu rendering support. Apple has depricated openCL support as well. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the foundation has already disabled cycles gpu rendering support on mac OS because of all the issues with openCl on that platform. I’m not a developer, so I can’t tell whether or not vulkan can be used to implement gpu rendering in cycles as well, but at the very least amd pro render does support metal, and there is a version for blender.
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Saying Vulkan is a 100% on Mac because MoltenVK exists is very optimistic. The Molten project has already encountered hiccups due to changes in the Metal spec, and Apple seems hell-bent on preventing those kinds of abstractions whenever possible.
Wow, I kind of assumed apple was just playing by their own rules when they chose to deprecate openGL, but if apple chooses to take aggressive steps to keep vulkan apps from running on their platform on top of removing openGl support, then I suppose the best action would be to stay away from their platform.
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Interesting, but my googling came up empty. Got a link?
I took the same approach with Apple for some time now, got out of the system.
I also think that the MacPro users would suffer if Cinema 4D, Houdini, Maya, Render-Man would not work anymore on Mac OS.
So maybe, Apple is working on their own software - they have productivity, movie but without effects and music. They had decent app for photographers and stopped so now we got into Adobe kind of forced. So, maybe Apple is bringing that content creator program as a product, to push VR, Arcade and the dream that YOU TO CAN BE ON APPLE TV+! Would be interesting even for them to build it on top of Blender and charge 200e for a white Blender.
Or if Steve was alive would say to be more focused so ditch Final Cut, Pro Logic and stick to the low variants as a cool stuff for students. Ditch also the iPod and milk the Apple subs. on music, games, movies etc.
Also I can confirm that on MacBook Pro 13 no open CL (logic), on MacBook Pro 16 base model no Open CL, on iMac 5K 2019 no open CL. I even asked those few who have iMac Pro to shine some light but no reply. In fact even a cylinder with transparent Shader will have a hard time in being usable in LokDev mode.
Cycles has a great use of CPU so the more expensive is the Mac product (from that point of view) the better.
Never say never… they are back with Adobe, now that they make great apps for their iPad Pro.
Next they have to fix relations with Google so that their iPhones can have more on that HDR on YouTube.
Apple is a company that goes on money - they made the big phone, they made the notch and they made the stylus so why shouldn’t they push to get more clients.
In fact for movie production you don’t need a super computer unless you make a lot of money (I worked in Television and what is good is here to stay mentality). For music a MacBook pro is more than enough. For writing and consuming you have the iPad. For drawing the iPad Pro is better than Wacom, some might say, but that is Windows fault…
So we on special effects (the guys who invented the digital anyway) we are the biggest consumers of what is new, great, and better= more expensive So why Apple would not listen to us…
I fully agree MS approach to the surface is lackluster and I own two.
Well both APIs are also still relatively young f
Vulcan is listed for this year as a possible target!
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The .fbx format isn’t so young anymore, but it hasn’t stopped Autodesk from rapid spec. changes so as to make sure Blender can’t work well in a VFX pipeline.
There is a precedent to what Apple is supposedly doing.
I am a metal programmer, I love using blender let me know how to contribute to make this transition to metal
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If you would like to help port blender to metal, then it’s best to start a thread about that on their devtalk forum. That is the official developer forum, so the people there should be able to point you in the right direction.
I also found this page on their wiki:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Developer_Intro