Blender now has an official ARM 64 version available to the public

[IamTimCook]

As more companies recognize the power of Apple Silicon and the Arm architecture, and almost a year after Apple anoucened their support for Open Source programs running on Apple Silicon and while highlighting Blender in the Keynote, Blender becomes the latest DCC to release their official ARM build (Alpha) to the public.

Now if we could just get Apple to throw some money and or developers at the Blender Foundation to code a Metal compatible version. Blender already runs extremely well on M1 Macs minus the lack of GPU support on count of Metal.
Everyone in the industry seems to be sponsoring this incredible Open Source program, let's see if we can get Apple to do the same.

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[NotTooLate]

Nice !! I wonder how good it is without metal , also I assume there is some support if apple showcased it on stage no?

 

[IamTimCook]

Nice !! I wonder how good it is without metal , also I assume there is some support if apple showcased it on stage no?

Actually all the non-rendering task work extremely well do to Blender handling most of these on the CPU and single core. The M1 seems to be the fastest machine I've tried for handling animation calculations and sims while working in Blender, with the animation playback running extremely fast.

And rendering with Cycles on the CPU isn't terrible, while the Eevee real-time render engine shines on the M1 Macs.

 

[NotTooLate]

Actually all the non-rendering task work extremely well do to Blender handling most of these on the CPU and single core. The M1 seems to be the fastest machine I've tried for handling animation calculations and sims while working in Blender, with the animation playback running extremely fast.

And rendering with Cycles on the CPU isn't terrible, while the Eevee real-time render engine shines on the M1 Macs.

Thanks for the update , thought about trying it out during this crazy times , went with piano learning instead as I work with a computer all day , but I must give it a try sooner rather then later !

 

[BootLoxes]

Ive waited 3000 years for this glorious moment.

 

[Gerdi]

Biggest issue with Blender on ARM64 is the Intel Embree library, where NEON support is essentially a hack.

 

[Xenobius]

Thanks! Finally, there it is.
Works great.

 

[Coheebuzz]

How much RAM does the Cycles renderer need? I tried rendering a ~250mb .obj with 5 materials and around 1 million polygons and it has written 48GB to swap in ~5 minutes, is that normal or is it leaking from somewhere?

 

[IamTimCook]

How much RAM does the Cycles renderer need? I tried rendering a ~250mb .obj with 5 materials and around 1 million polygons and it has written 48GB to swap in ~5 minutes, is that normal or is it leaking from somewhere?

It depends on the scene, more objects and materials equal more RAM needed.
Right click in the bottom right area and check the box for VRAM usage. When using the viewport render it will show total VRAM usage, but not when viewport is just wireframe.
You may have a 8K textures and not know it?

 

[Coheebuzz]

It depends on the scene, more objects and materials equal more RAM needed.
Right click in the bottom right area and check the box for VRAM usage. When using the viewport render it will show total VRAM usage, but not when viewport is just wireframe.
You may have a 8K textures and not know it?

On second launch it seems to be working fine, VRAM usage is at 2.5GB with Cycles enabled in Viewport and i am not getting crazy swap writes either, not sure what happened earlier.

I do see a MacOS bug though, it seems that every time you open a folder containing .obj's they all get loaded into memory irregardless of their size, i have a 'SceneKitQLThumbnail Extension' process just sitting there and using 2GBs long after moving on to other things.

 

[IamTimCook]

On second launch it seems to be working fine, VRAM usage is at 2.5GB with Cycles enabled in Viewport and i am not getting crazy swap writes either, not sure what happened earlier.

I do see a MacOS bug though, it seems that every time you open a folder containing .obj's they all get loaded into memory irregardless of their size, i have a 'SceneKitQLThumbnail Extension' process just sitting there and using 2GBs long after moving on to other things.

Can I ask if you will do a big report?
In one of the top pull downs (I think the Blender icon?) you’ll see “Report Bug”. This will take you to Blender developer site with your pertinent system info preloaded.
Be descriptive when listing the issue and load a .blend file if applicable.
I do believe you need to make an account if you haven’t already.
Thanks.

 

[BootLoxes]

Hows eevee? Im not big on cycles even if it looks better. I was going to try it yesterday but work kept me until late

 

[Coheebuzz]

Can I ask if you will do a big report?
In one of the top pull downs (I think the Blender icon?) you’ll see “Report Bug”. This will take you to Blender developer site with your pertinent system info preloaded.
Be descriptive when listing the issue and load a .blend file if applicable.
I do believe you need to make an account if you haven’t already.
Thanks.

I'll need to recreate the scene and try to reproduce my steps as it was just a test scene i quickly threw together but sure, if i catch anything i'll let them know.

 

[IamTimCook]

Hows eevee? Im not big on cycles even if it looks better.

It's an extremely competent and powerful render engine. The improvements made in the 2.93 version of Blender are really exciting; Better Motion Blur, much much improved Depth of Field, AO accuracy, and more.

The first four shots are from scenes I'm working on. The last is a Demo file (Junk Shop) from the Blender Foundation's site. All done using Eevee. 4K images with render times of 45 secs or less on M1 Mini.

 

[BootLoxes]

It's an extremely competent and powerful render engine. The improvements made in the 2.93 version of Blender are really exciting; Better Motion Blur, much much improved Depth of Field, AO accuracy, and more.

The first four shots are from scenes I'm working on. The last is a Demo file (Junk Shop) from the Blender Foundation's site. All done using Eevee. 4K images with render times of 45 secs or less on M1 Mini.

Beautiful. I wonder how much longer it will be in beta for.

 

[l0stl0rd]

Probably for a while considering it is only an alpha and not even beta yet.
I confirm Eevee works well but there are some slight shadow/light bugs that I do not have on my windows machine with the same version.

 

[l0stl0rd]

um ok I am confused is says beta now and 3.0 Alpha mmh.

Had a look, should they manage to keep their timeline 2.93 will be released a final version in May.

 

[BootLoxes]

Its finally out of beta as of today. 2.93 LTS just released with apple silicon support

 

[terminator-jq]

Can’t wait to see how this runs on the new M1X Pro models. I’ll have to cook up some high poly scenes to test it against my 2019 16”

 

[BootLoxes]

Can’t wait to see how this runs on the new M1X Pro models. I’ll have to cook up some high poly scenes to test it against my 2019 16”

I am super excited for cyclesX coming in Blender 3.0 even though I already have two renderers on my mac (toolbag 4 and v-ray) but this will be my first native renderer. Been eyeing redshift because it is native too. I think i have a problem lol

 

[Kung gu]

I am super excited for cyclesX coming in Blender 3.0 even though I already have two renderers on my mac (toolbag 4 and v-ray) but this will be my first native renderer. Been eyeing redshift because it is native too. I think i have a problem lol

do you think cyclesX will use metal as acceleration??

so far they have shown it with cuda and optiX

 

[BootLoxes]

do you think cyclesX will use metal as acceleration??

so far they have shown it with cuda and optiX

I am not sure. It seems like with most other 3d software, macs are more of an afterthought.

 

[Kung gu]

I am not sure. It seems like with most other 3d software, macs are more of an afterthought.

I think that will change when MacBooks with 32 and 64GB of unified memory come out. This means the GPU in the SoC can access most of that memory.



Sure there are laptops with 64 GB memory buts its not unified. In windows laptops the GPU cannot access the RAM that's why there is dedicated memory on windows laptops and Intel Macs.

No Windows laptop GPU has access to that kind of memory. Even the RTX 5000 series go up to 16GB VRAM.

Apple Sillicon will the make Mac great instead of being a backbone computer IMO.

 

[BootLoxes]

I think that will change when MacBooks with 32 and 64GB of unified memory come out. This means the GPU in the SoC can access most of that memory.



Sure there are laptops with 64 GB memory buts its not unified. In windows laptops the GPU cannot access the RAM that's why there is dedicated memory on windows laptops and Intel Macs.

No Windows laptop GPU has access to that kind of memory. Even the RTX 5000 series go up to 16GB VRAM.

Apple Sillicon will the make Mac great instead of being a backbone computer IMO.

That is really what I hope for since its getting hard to get pc parts to do my 3d stuff. I need a native version of zbrush, toolbag 4 (will drop for blender or redshift if it never gets a native port) and substance painter. Though the biggest for me is zbrush by far. I can work around toolbag and substance but i need zbrush up and running natively ASAP

 

[IamTimCook]

do you think cyclesX will use metal as acceleration??

so far they have shown it with cuda and optiX

On the Developer site for Blender the lead developer has hinted at a Metal version.

OpenCL on Apple M1

You might have seen the announcement here: Basically the current OpenCL kernel implementation is being removed entirely. Performance issues are part of the reason. The way forward will be a Metal backed on macOS. There’s nothing specific we can announce regarding that, but probably it is just...

devtalk.blender.org