I fully agree and feel the same.
Are really only 2% of Blender users working on Macs? That would be extremely low.
I think the only chance of getting better Mac support for Blender would be, if Apple would fund the blender foundation…generously.
But as long as they don’t see some short to midterm profit arising from it, they won’t do it, I’m afraid.
To my fellow Mac users who love and use Blender, I think our best bet is for Vulkan to become a priority in the Blender development. That will be our bridge, albeit far from perfect. Metal is going to really shine for us and we do have rendering options coming along. But dang, I sure do love Cycles…
3D in itself is not going away from the Mac OS. There is a coming AR/VR reality about to set in and all platforms will need creation tools. Having said that, my lament as a Mac user is that Apple really doesn’t seem to care for any open source applications. And probably for the worst reason, they can’t find a way to make money off of them. 
But here’s hoping there is always a way to run Blender on MacOS.
yep, ‘OPEN SOURCE’ is not really an expression apple execs are drooling over!
Yep, a Metal wrapper for Vulkan will be the way to go for Blender macOS. It will probably work fine, although there might be a slight bit of overhead because of the detour.
I think it would be good, too, but I also have my doubts. Apple has created its own raytracing API for Metal3 and probably it will be used in new Metal rendering engines (Redshift, OctaneX…). Whats more next year we’ll see AMD cards with hardware raytracing and Metal will use it of course. I’m afraid it can be difficult to translate this to Vulkan.
Anyway even Eevee and interface driven by Vulkan (Metal) would be great.
Molten VK is a wrapper for Metal but it does not offer 1 to 1 compatibility with Vulkan. It looks like it is more suited to situation where shaders are precompiled than constantly changing like in 3D software. Live shaders have to be interpreted by the wrapper which will be slower than native Vulkan how slow will depend on how complex the shader is.
Interesting comparison of two Apple Motion engines - Metal vs OpenGL:
https://barefeats.com/apple-motion-new-metal-engine.html
What is important - Metal quite nicely support multi GPU configuration for rasterization (unfortunately not eGPU at the moment):
“Motion takes advantage of all the GPUs in your Mac and uses up to 28 CPU cores in processor-intensive ProRes workflows. Motion is also optimized for the Afterburner card to accelerate ProRes projects, so you can design motion graphics and watch your results instantly in groundbreaking 8K resolution.”
Stop, or I’ll start to regret my move back to Windows. 
Hold your horses. Apple can still screw this up anyway.
If Apple’s handling of OpenGL and OpenCL over the years is any indication, whoever ends up maintaining MoltenVK is going to be forever chasing feature compliance. Apple is known to completely ignore design specs, even their own. Hunting Metal bugs is difficult. Hunting Vulkan bugs is difficult. Hunting Metal bugs via Vulkan is a nightmare job I can’t imagine many people willingly signing up for.
FCPX is running slower today than it did in 2015. About two years ago the performance took a dump and this Metal update rolls back some of that performance drop but in no way does it match where the performance was in 2015.
That’s all the Barefeats figures show, bad performance vs better performance not the true picture.
In 2015 I could play 5 4k streams superimposed over each other with out dropping a single frame. When Apple screwed the performance in 2017 I could manage 3 streams. Today’s Metal can manage 4 streams before dropping frames.
I’ve used FCPX from day one I know the historical performance of FCPX that isn’t being told. Metal is no magic bullet for performance.
Sooner or later the Mac Pro will be released and Apple will have nowhere to hide as renderers like Redshift are compared, Metal vs CUDA and no marketing BS to hide behind. Just real world benchmarks. I can hear the excuses already.
I find exactly the opposite for me. I’m still cutting on a weekly bases and It feels like performance has more than doubled, mostly when using anything filmed with Prores. I honestly can’t say I noticed any difference with the big Metal update that happened a few weeks ago.
You did mention earlier that you are still using the Trashcan? I’m hearing from colleagues who had the Trashcan and moved to an iMac around 2017 that it far out paced the old Mac Pro, even the $1200 entry iMacs.
I don’t know if you have had a chance to work on a recent iMac or even Macbook Pro but if you can try cutting on one. I’ve worked with the Mac laptops from time to time and have had no problem scrubbing in Real-time with 4K footage with multi-cam.
Tim
No one here is saying that Metal alone is going to be some magic bullet. It’s the potential marriage of Metal and future Apple hardware that’s is going to give Apple users that large advantage.
I still find it funny how Android users (some not all, some of y’all just like the Android platform regardless of it’s performance) walk around in delusional state (sorry to other forum members, I only say this in a negative context because of the marketing vs benchmark comments) that their phones are far superior in performance. It’s like they’re only reading some weird copy of Android Times lol.
.
http://browser.geekbench.com/mobile-benchmarks
You’ll have to scroll the page a bit cause even the iPhones from 5 generation ago are performing better than the latest flagship androids.
The iphones are so far ahead of the competition with their in-house designed ARM processors and iOS that a iPhone with 4GB ram can literally double the performance of phones with 12GB ram.
I can already hear the excuses for why the benchmarks are wrong. lol
This same marriage is going to happen on the Laptop and Desktop side of things in the not too distant future.
We just want Blender to be ready too, cause we really love using this software.
Apple does actively work on their pro software. Logic is constantly updated with features every year for free. Major features too, not just patches or bug fixes. I’m not an FCPX user so I have no clue what’s going on there but that’s not the only pro app Apple makes. Logic has had metal support in some of their plugins since El Cap if I’m not mistaken.
If I had a pound coin for every time I’d this statement for Apple user I’d be able to retire early. The future or the next release or the next Mac Pro is always going to be the one that changes the fortunes of Apple users. I’ts like a broken record.
Apple have never been at the forefront of performance, ever. The only reason why I used Macs in my business for over a decade was because Microsoft was so utter abysmal during that time and I wanted to avoid Vista et al. Even with MS being useless Macs were still slower.
BTW, I’m not using a Trashcan to edit. I said it was junk. I have a late 2015 iMac that I used to cut on with FCPX. It is slower today than it was in 2015 running FCPX, that is a fact. I didn’t say I had any problem scrubbing 4k footage, I thought I explained clearly.
Like all our Macs it’s no longer used in frontline production we’ve moved to Resolve on the PC for editing and finishing.
Nice talking to you but I’m done. I look forward to the benchmarks.
Like I said… some of y’all are in some weird isolated bubble. Here is a benchmark test where, at least for video just a run of the mill MacBook Pro (yes a laptop) is smoking a desktop machine with Nvidia GPUs in render times and live scrubbing. And the margin isn’t even close.
The video is a couple of years old, I only use this because he’s not bias and it’s a PC heavy channel. He also explains his results well. But there are numerous channel and sites coming to the same conclusion, and the gap in performance between Mac and PC has only grown in more current editions for video professional that is.
Hey I love what Nvidia is doing and I wish that Macs could use there hardware. But maybe the reason Apple isn’t concerned is well, Apple isn’t concerned. Lol
And we aren’t saying it’s coming… It’s already here Macs with Mac optimized software is already miles ahead of PCs for video work.
I read that AppleInsider article the other day. All I can say is: Don’t buy into the hype.
First of all, in terms of features, Metal is inferior to OpenCL2 and OpenCL2 is inferior to CUDA.
In some ways, this is good: A simpler API has a better chance of being reliable. OpenCL2 would’ve been good it if it worked properly, which it didn’t.
In other ways, this is bad: Porting a CUDA application that takes advantage of all its features is going to be difficult.
In any event, CUDA is the best GPGPU platform, hands down. Pretty much the only downside is vendor-lock in. NVIDIA owns this market, and it charges a premium for it.
To kick NVIDIA off the throne, competitors would have to deliver a massive advantage to justify the significant cost of migrating. The opposite is true right now, NVIDIA is one generation ahead with tensor cores and hardware raytracing shipping right now - with software to support it.
Therefore, outside of sound/video editing, I predict that the new Mac Pro will elicit crickets and tumbleweed, much like its trashcan predecessor.
What switch? Last time I used a Mac OS in a studio, Mac OS was the default for printing and photography work. From what I hear, that is all gone now.
So, metal is going to suddenly get all these people to suddenly dump all their current Windows kit and swap back to Macs? I don’t think so. I can build an equivalent machine to the new Mac Pro as a Windows or Linux box, and I don’t need a second mortgage to do it.
My first computer was a Mac and I used one till the late 90’s when Jobs cancelled the Mac clones. The cost of hardware just wasn’t competitive with a regular PC. I liked Mac OS, but not to the tune of what Apple were asking for what was standard PC kit under the skin.
When Apple fell out with Nvidia and replaced all their GPUs with AMD chips, I think that was the real end. No matter how much of an OpenCL fanboy you are, CUDA is the industry standard for graphics software acceleration. Putting Radeon/Firepro chips in your ‘pro’ machines is just resigning from the race and still circling the track.
Tim,
If you think exporting and stabilisation count for anything in a complete end to end workflow you’re sadly mistaken. Comparing FCPX to Adobe Premiere means absolutely nothing, everyone knows Premiere is horrible and very poorly optimised on both platforms.
Come back when your toy software FCPX can edit, composite multichannel OpenEXRs and finish like we do in Resolve/Fusion. We switched from FCPX because Apple couldn’t be arsed to add professional level workflows that we used to be able to do in FCS+Shake all those years ago. FCPX is amateurware.
I think you’re the one living in a weird koolaid filled bubble, I run a production company with real clients doing real work. You should get out more into the real world where your Apple PR and marketing BS wouldn’t last 5 mins.
I do edit in Resolve and have talked about it’s use a few times here on this forum. It’s a great program and I use it on both my systems Windows and MacOS. And between the two Resolve works considerably better on a Mac. I was trying to show you a perfect example of Apple’s optimization and why it matters. But spin it how you want…