What is the current state of eGPU support for Cycles on Macs?

[Metin_Seven]

@cartoon.five

I strongly disagree. We need to convince BF to support Metal. I do not care so much about Apple and its policies, but there are a lot of real people and artists using macs for various reasons (including me) and losing them because Apples recent decision are questionable for some would be a pity. After all, creative freedom includes free choice of platform, because creation is not only about one app.

There’s a huge discussion about that here at Blender Artists. The main issue is that Blender is a cross-platform application, and Cycles is a core part of that. OpenCL is cross-platform, so Blender could use that until recently. But to make Cycles Metal-compliant, a separate build would have to be maintained only for macOS. There’s no budget for a separate macOS maintainer. On top of that, when Apple fully drops OpenGL in a few years, Blender would have to change its many internal OpenGL calls as well. A solution would be to make a Metal wrapper for the Vulkan library, but that will take a lot of time, and will mean some overhead.

@cartoon.five

P.S. As long as I have used Macs, I also have used PCs. Right next to me is a HP behemoth with countless cores and a really nice NVidia card. I tried to like it and the Windows that it is running and do all my work on it. After a year I shifted back to the Macbook as the main device. Why? Because most things in Windows suck a little. Changing system settings, pairing devices, even basic things like BT audio, managing files and so on is always just a little bit more tedious and awkward than with macOS. The whole system is inconsistent in terms of UX and design. I can try to ignore that, but only for so long.

Admitted, Blender and other graphic related apps fly on that beast. But the rest of the time (which is a lot) I use to avoid the obstacles that Windows consists of and bend it to my will with things like Autohotkey or 3rd party file managers. On the Mac I just can focus on my work, which is quite a relief.

MacOS is definitely very comfortable. It isn’t my intention to start an OS war, but I’m just happy that Windows didn’t disappoint after 4 years of macOS.