3D Rendering on Apple Silicon, CPU&GPU

[Xiao_Xi]

Is that actually the official codename, because I started using that phrase (in this thread) once I read about the viewport going Metal... ;^p

As far as I know, Blender versions do not have official code names. I like to use it because it reflects the importance of that version for macOS users. If all goes according to plan, that version will get Metal backend for viewport and tons of Cycles optimizations.

For tracking Apple Silicon specific optimisations (macOS 13.0+), targeting Blender 3.5 release:

Cycles Apple Silicon optimisations

**Tasks** For tracking Apple Silicon specific optimisations (macOS 13.0+). - [x] Architecture specific parameter tuning - [x] Threads / Threadgroup - [x] Num concurrent states / busy states - [x] Work scheduling improvements - [ ] Add new multi-device abstraction for sharing WorkTileSchedul...

developer.blender.org

 

[singhs.apps]

In rendering related news :

Hopefully we get some unreal love for Mx Macs. Oh wait. Epic :/

 

[diamond.g]

In rendering related news :

Hopefully we get some unreal love for Mx Macs. Oh wait. Epic :/

The Editor is AS native if you compile it from source... 🫤

 

[ader42]

What 'softwares' are we talking about?

Let’s say a machine has a useful life of 3 years.

Maya is £2k a year - so that’s £6k

Maxon One is £1.2k a year - so that’s £3.6k

Keyshot Pro is £3,400 for 3 years

Software is not cheap.

 

[ader42]

Zbrush presentation ended. Better masking tools, more c4d integration, and redshift inside zbrush (gpu if you have the sub and cpu if you use a perpetual license)

No mentioning of apple silicon support

Yeah that Redshift inside ZBrush looked really good - and SSS at last!

 

[singhs.apps]

Let’s say a machine has a useful life of 3 years.

Maya is £2k a year - so that’s £6k

Maxon One is £1.2k a year - so that’s £3.6k

Keyshot Pro is £3,400 for 3 years

Software is not cheap.

No one said it's cheap. That doesn't make it 'more expensive than hardware'.

 

[iPadified]

In rendering related news :

Hopefully we get some unreal love for Mx Macs. Oh wait. Epic :/

Looks nice except the light. Overexposed or a very bright and white sun at sunset/raise. On purpose or is it the engine?

 

[ader42]

No one said it's cheap. That doesn't make it 'more expensive than hardware'.

It does for all the design studios I’ve worked in that until ASi bought most designers an iMac (not iMac Pro) and now buy Apple Studios.

 

[singhs.apps]

Looks nice except the light. Overexposed or a very bright and white sun at sunset/raise. On purpose or is it the engine?

Engine likely. Some post processing may help.

Nevertheless impressive. It’s hard to nitpick when getting 30fps+ with that level of quality and fixing most issues of Lumen’s first iteration in v5.

Nanite is a great technology. Removes so many gotchas of real-time stuff.

Will be awesome to work in VR with Unreal 5x.

 

[singhs.apps]

The Editor is AS native if you compile it from source... 🫤

Hopefully 5.1.x will fix that out of the box.

 

[singhs.apps]

Modo 16.1 Roadmap Livestream

Join us on Friday November 18th for the Modo 2022-2023 Roadmap Webinar! Modo Product Manager, Greg Brown will be reviewing what will be coming in Modo 16.1 t...

www.youtube.com

Modo support for metal raytracing in upcoming v16.1
Also Modo v16.1/v17.x beta running native on M1 macs coming soon.

 

[Xiao_Xi]

A couple of slides from the Modo presentation.

 

[jujoje]

Modo 16.1 Roadmap Livestream

Join us on Friday November 18th for the Modo 2022-2023 Roadmap Webinar! Modo Product Manager, Greg Brown will be reviewing what will be coming in Modo 16.1 t...

www.youtube.com

Modo support for metal raytracing in upcoming v16.1
Also Modo v16.1/v17.x beta running native on M1 macs coming soon.

Certainly didn't have Modo on my 2022 bingo card for Metal support or raytracing! Hopefully the AS port means it's a bit more stable on the Mac too.

The raytracing feature set is still a bit limited; it's kind of funny that pretty much every GPU engine seems to go through the same stages of feature implementation, with the first pass not supporting volumes, dispersion, light linking etc. Was the same with both Karma and Renderman.

Seems like a pretty nice update from having skimmed through the feature lists (also shoutout to the invariable blender "modo sux" user in the comments; you do you )

Also, noticed that Modo's pricing seems to be a bit more reasonable these days at $641 a year. Still seems a bit pricy but not too bad.

 

[singhs.apps]

Certainly didn't have Modo on my 2022 bingo card for Metal support or raytracing! Hopefully the AS port means it's a bit more stable on the Mac too.

The raytracing feature set is still a bit limited; it's kind of funny that pretty much every GPU engine seems to go through the same stages of feature implementation, with the first pass not supporting volumes, dispersion, light linking etc. Was the same with both Karma and Renderman.

Seems like a pretty nice update from having skimmed through the feature lists (also shoutout to the invariable blender "modo sux" user in the comments; you do you )

Also, noticed that Modo's pricing seems to be a bit more reasonable these days at $641 a year. Still seems a bit pricy but not too bad.

Performance issues aside, I love Modo’s modeling approach so much so that it’s my main driver as of past few years.

By next year if all goes well we will have another DCC running native on Mx macs.

mPath render quality is good but it’s too feature limited at this stage.
So currently reliant on 3rd party (when final render is via Modo) which is basically only Octane as of today.

Hopefully they fix stuff in Modo so chaos offers vray as it used to.

Viz GPU development following the same route, most CPUs also follow the same path - covering base stuff first.

mPath is still primarily a CPU first renderer but they are also trying to be GPU agnostic going forward.

 

[jujoje]

Performance issues aside, I love Modo’s modeling approach so much so that it’s my main driver as of past few years.

Modo’s modelling toolset is great; really wish they’d release the modelling / uv tabs as their own standalone app (have a feeling of deja vu about this - think it came up earlier in this thread).

Hadn't really followed Modo development after about 501; the mPath renderer looked pretty interesting. One of the surprising result I cam across was that embree was performing pretty close to Optix (although that was an old presentation, so probably a bit different now).

Either way, as you say, it's good to hear that that they're updating for AS; another DCC app on the bandwagon.

 

[sirio76]

Hopefully they fix stuff in Modo so chaos offers vray as it used to.

Vray for Modo has been discontinued and is not coming back for the foreseeable future. When this happens is rarely because of technical issues, is mostly due to commercial reasons, like the user base is too little to justify the development cost.

 

[sirio76]

it's kind of funny that pretty much every GPU engine seems to go through the same stages of feature implementation, with the first pass not supporting volumes, dispersion, light linking etc. Was the same with both Karma and Renderman.

Is not strange, beside that every new engine (CPU/GPU) tend to implement essential feature only at the beginnning, development (both coding and debugging) of GPU engines is much more challenging compared to CPU engines.
Just think about GPU drivers for example, you update them and suddenly feature XY don't work anymore, or the engine crash, or is much slower, this alone makes development more difficult.

 

[singhs.apps]

Vray for Modo has been discontinued and is not coming back for the foreseeable future. When this happens is rarely because of technical issues, is mostly due to commercial reasons, like the user base is too little to justify the development cost.

I think they changed something’s in v15 or v16 which made it too much of an effort for chaos.

You are right viz commercial viability but then since chaos has gone all DCC bundle maybe it won’t hurt them to try again. Bulk of the work would already have been done for previous offerings.

Also Foundry is trying to make it easier to plug third party renderers, so let’s see.

But if mPath goes fully functional, maybe it won’t be missed.

 

[jujoje]

Is not strange, beside that every new engine (CPU/GPU) tend to implement essential feature only at the beginnning, development (both coding and debugging) of GPU engines is much more challenging compared to CPU engines.
Just think about GPU drivers for example, you update them and suddenly feature XY don't work anymore, or the engine crash, or is much slower, this alone makes development more difficult.

I was surprised at the uniformity across the different renderers more than anything else - I guess everyones implementing path tracing starting at the easy paths first, and then increasing complexity. Was also bit surprised that light linking was missing - I think even Cycles doesn't support it, or didn't till recently.

 

[deconstruct60]

A couple of slides from the Modo presentation.
View attachment 2115322
View attachment 2115323

I couldn't find where these slides came from What is MacBook Pro SSE and MacBook Air SSE . 'SSE' is the x86 SSE instructions? ( versus using Metal to compute and the "Rosetta2" aspect of that is just implicit? ) So that first slide there is no 'arm native' measurements present there at all (besides postproduct of Rosetta process on M1 instances )?

First graph on first slide is confusing. The second bar is for an Intel i7; yet also labeling "Metal(Rosetta2)". "Rosetta2" is a non factor there. That first slide seems all about x86 binaries across all of the two charts. Rosetta2 SSE code is worse than Rosetta2 Metal code. ( not really too surprising. Helps broadly to update x86 apps to Metal also regardless of M-series. ) .

Second graph first slide , not good to throw heavy SSE Rosetta workload at 4 Efficiency core. [ Again more mystery labeling of how a M1 Max does not have 4 E cores. ] And Metal (i.e. GPU resource ) code going from 7 cores to 24 cores just getting about a 40% bump decrease, probably is in the "make it work" stage before "make it fast". ( would be curious if it also didn't scale well on bigger AMD GPUs than the laptop ones that Apple used on Intel MacBooks. )


Rosetta2 doesn't cover AVX , so the folks lingering on the lowest common denominator SIMD system ( relatively quite old SSE) are at a substantive disadvantage.

 

[terminator-jq]

Modo 16.1 Roadmap Livestream

Join us on Friday November 18th for the Modo 2022-2023 Roadmap Webinar! Modo Product Manager, Greg Brown will be reviewing what will be coming in Modo 16.1 t...

www.youtube.com

Modo support for metal raytracing in upcoming v16.1
Also Modo v16.1/v17.x beta running native on M1 macs coming soon.

Very nice to see Modo get Apple Silicon support. It actually came relatively quickly by Foundry’s standards! Unfortunately, Modo is an application that is really in desperate need of a larger development team and much more financial support from their parent company. I stayed on the Modo train from version 10.0 to version 15.0 and while the software has amazing potential and one of the best modeling toolsets, the development progress was moving at a snail’s pace… There was a lot of us Modo users who were paying yearly maintenance for features we’d never use, meanwhile our constant pleads for better character animation tools, painting tools and other things remained unanswered.

Blender 2.8 came out and a lot of us jumped ship. I believe it was the Barbershop animation short that caught a lot of us off guard as we saw this free software do things that were literally impossible in the $1800 Modo. Then Apple Silicon came out and anyone without the most recent Modo version was left with major issues. Many of us were stuck with unusable licenses even though other programs were able to translate through rosetta without issue. Then came the news that Vray would not be returning no doubt due to the shrinking user base.

I’m just saying all of this so if any of you get tempted to jump onto the Modo train, you’ll know what you’re getting into… It’s a great modeler and it’s nice to get Apple Silicon support but if you need anything outside of hard surface modeling, you’ll be better off looking elsewhere.

BTW: this is not to knock the Modo developers. If they ever release a Modo “lite” version with just modeling and UV for a cheap price, I’d be first in line.

 

[singhs.apps]

Very nice to see Modo get Apple Silicon support. It actually came relatively quickly by Foundry’s standards! Unfortunately, Modo is an application that is really in desperate need of a larger development team and much more financial support from their parent company. I stayed on the Modo train from version 10.0 to version 15.0 and while the software has amazing potential and one of the best modeling toolsets, the development progress was moving at a snail’s pace… There was a lot of us Modo users who were paying yearly maintenance for features we’d never use, meanwhile our constant pleads for better character animation tools, painting tools and other things remained unanswered.

Blender 2.8 came out and a lot of us jumped ship. I believe it was the Barbershop animation short that caught a lot of us off guard as we saw this free software do things that were literally impossible in the $1800 Modo. Then Apple Silicon came out and anyone without the most recent Modo version was left with major issues. Many of us were stuck with unusable licenses even though other programs were able to translate through rosetta without issue. Then came the news that Vray would not be returning no doubt due to the shrinking user base.

I’m just saying all of this so if any of you get tempted to jump onto the Modo train, you’ll know what you’re getting into… It’s a great modeler and it’s nice to get Apple Silicon support but if you need anything outside of hard surface modeling, you’ll be better off looking elsewhere.

Yes. A lot of mixed signals coming out viz Modo.

They certainly can do with a much larger developer team to push things forward. Besides they seem to have some significant clientele in some non VFX/cg biz (which would explain why they are focusing on certain tools )

On the other hand creating a new renderer from the ground up or a Mx version for the Macs seem like major undertakings for a shrinking user base.

Methinks they are preparing for a sale to a larger company which would explain their diving deep into the code base.

Other vendors too have had slowdowns followed by rapid outpour of features in newer versions (essentially a rewrite)

But yes, it seems foundry doesn’t know what to do with Modo.Let’s see.

 

[Boil]

...Modo.

Methinks they are preparing for a sale to a larger company which would explain them diving deep into their code base.

Other vendors too have had slowdowns followed by rapid outpour of features in newer versions (essentially a rewrite)

But yes, it seems foundry doesn’t know what to do with Modo.Let’s see.

Hmm... Brad Peebler, former CEO of Luxology, is now with Apple; maybe Apple buys Modo...?

 

[singhs.apps]

Hmm... Brad Peebler, former CEO of Luxology, is now with Apple; maybe Apple buys Modo...?

Ahahaha… and kill it faster than Aperture and Shake ? Or dumb it down so much that whatever user base remains flee to greener pastures. No thanks

 

[Xiao_Xi]

I couldn't find where these slides came from

I have edited my post with links to that part of the presentation.