Blender update adds support for Metal GPU rendering on Mac

Here are two predictions based on this news:
1. Blender will render at around 1/10th the speed on the top end Mac Studio compared to a top end GPU.
2. Apple fans will blame Blender's developers because they don't know how to use Metal correctly.

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

Here are two predictions based on this news:
1. Blender will render at around 1/10th the speed on the top end Mac Studio compared to a top end GPU.
2. Apple fans will blame Blender's developers because they don't know how to use Metal correctly.

Did you read the article?  Or are you just paid to post negative comments?

The addition of a Metal GPU backend, which was contributed by Apple

Apple themselves wrote the Metal backend for Blender.

Having actually written shaders in both GLSL and MSL, I can say that Metal is an absolute pleasure to work with by comparison (passing data from CPU to GPU is much easier).  The performance in my experience was about the same on equivalent GPU hardware, but then I wasn't writing a full blown 3D design application.  I'll be interested to see a comparison for Blender.

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

Here are two predictions based on this news:
1. Blender will render at around 1/10th the speed on the top end Mac Studio compared to a top end GPU.
2. Apple fans will blame Blender's developers because they don't know how to use Metal correctly.

You simply go into preferences and turn it on.
Even you could do that...

AppleInsider said:

The addition of a Metal GPU backend, which was contributed by Apple, allows Blender to take advantage of the built-in graphics processing unit in Apple's M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chipsets. The Metal GPU rendering is also available on Macs with an AMD graphics card.

According to Blender, the new Metal GPU support allows for rendering times that are up to 2 times quicker. The app itself also runs faster on M1 Macs because the app now have direct access to the GPU.

Metal also offers more than 2x speedup for faster models, 2x is for M1 GPU vs M1 CPU. There are benchmarks here that render 3 scenes:

Open Data Benchmarks

The Metal implementation hasn't been tuned for performance yet:

https://developer.blender.org/T92212

M1 CPU = 86
M1 GPU = 178
M1 Max CPU = 196
M1 Max GPU = 692
ThreadRipper 3970X (32-core) = 840
AMD Radeon Pro W6900X = 2124 (Mac Pro Metal)
3060 laptop = 2303
3070 laptop = 3010
3090 & 3080ti = ~5900

The Nvidia GPUs are using Optix for optimal raytracing:

https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/ray-tracing/optix

The W6900X result is interesting as that's using Metal just like the M1 but is 3x faster than the Max GPU. Apple said the M1 Ultra was 80% faster than the W6900X in their GPU test:



They will need to do some performance tuning on the software. However, Metal still gives a 3.5x speedup on M1 Max GPU over the CPU.

Apple may not be able to match the RTX GPUs without hardware raytracing, it's not really expected either. For this kind of workflow, there would be no harm in buying NVidia PCs for rendering, the 3060 laptops are cheap around $1000 each and there were even crypto farms using these. The Mac can be used as the workstation and send the final renders or animations to the PCs.

If Apple can get the software tuned so that the Ultra in the Mac Studio matches or exceeds the W6900X, that would be a good result. Future versions of Apple Silicon can include hardware raytracing units if they see this extra 2-3x speedup as worthwhile, I wouldn't expect it before M3. The software needs to be optimal before they can start adding hardware accelerators because they need to know where the bottlenecks are. Different raytracing hardware implementations can have very different speedups e.g allowing for motion blur.

It's good to see Apple directly implementing Metal support in 3rd party software. Hiring a few people to work on it is a small cost for them but it adds a lot for creative users on Macs.

But will it blend?