this was yet another reason to be looking at a PC given it is already there and no doubt better supported in many ways...... would love to be proved wrong though.
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MP 7,1 GPU rendering on the new Mac Pro. News, updates, chat.
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this was yet another reason to be looking at a PC given it is already there and no doubt better supported in many ways...... would love to be proved wrong though.
Hmmmmmm. Still no update. Not surprising. Any word on how long the free MacPro license will be delayed after initial launch?
Depends. I think early in this thread I think there was mention that Apple was contributing to this. If that was a private 'fork' of what is now the macOS 11 Metal Rendering API then it may have gotten entangled in the macOS release process. Previously Apple may have thought it wouldn't take quite as long and this was going to be an 10.15.4+ update as a more widely supported ( and distributed) API. So if a piece of Apple code is a crticial piece and Apple doesn't want to release it then the whole app would be stuck. That would be a very legit reason. ( could question why OTOY would want to limit themselves that dependency or openly talk about something they did't have total release control on as if they did. )
If Apple as more broadly used base functionality library that is better for overall ecosystem ( both Apple and other application developers can leverage work put in by Apple over a longer period of time).
Discover ray tracing with Metal - WWDC20 - Videos - Apple Developer
Achieve photorealistic 3D scenes in your apps and games through ray tracing — a core part of the Metal graphics framework and Shading...
If Apple is doing a 'backport' of this new API to mac 10.15 (if nominally starting on macOS 11) then probably will only want to do that backport validation against the 'last' ( or close to the last) 10.15.x variants.
3-6 delay months now is probably worth it for workload shifting to Apple if the API is more than reasonably useful over next 2-10 years. (and Apple takes most of the development/maintenance cost over that same time period. )
If this is all on the "standard" ('older' , 2018-19) Metal stack then perhaps closer to the "absolutely no reason" zone. (although 'has bugs' would be a legit reason). "Apple started shipping a new AMD GPU and having optimized for it yet". .. yeah that is weak as water. "Apple is going to ship another macOS version in the Fall" ... again that was known last year.
Depends. I think early in this thread I think there was mention that Apple was contributing to this. If that was a private 'fork' of what is now the macOS 11 Metal Rendering API then it may have gotten entangled in the macOS release process. Previously Apple may have thought it wouldn't take quite as long and this was going to be an 10.15.4+ update as a more widely supported ( and distributed) API. So if a piece of Apple code is a crticial piece and Apple doesn't want to release it then the whole app would be stuck. That would be a very legit reason. ( could question why OTOY would want to limit themselves that dependency or openly talk about something they did't have total release control on as if they did. )
If Apple as more broadly used base functionality library that is better for overall ecosystem ( both Apple and other application developers can leverage work put in by Apple over a longer period of time).
Discover ray tracing with Metal - WWDC20 - Videos - Apple Developer
Achieve photorealistic 3D scenes in your apps and games through ray tracing — a core part of the Metal graphics framework and Shading...developer.apple.com
If Apple is doing a 'backport' of this new API to mac 10.15 (if nominally starting on macOS 11) then probably will only want to do that backport validation against the 'last' ( or close to the last) 10.15.x variants.
3-6 delay months now is probably worth it for workload shifting to Apple if the API is more than reasonably useful over next 2-10 years. (and Apple takes most of the development/maintenance cost over that same time period. )
If this is all on the "standard" ('older' , 2018-19) Metal stack then perhaps closer to the "absolutely no reason" zone. (although 'has bugs' would be a legit reason). "Apple started shipping a new AMD GPU and having optimized for it yet". .. yeah that is weak as water. "Apple is going to ship another macOS version in the Fall" ... again that was known last year.
I always understood also that Apple were working closely with Otoy and it has been designed with the new AS Macs in place. The metal support was obvious when they said it was working on iPhones and iPads and as such will be fine for the new Macs of 2021.
However, for me, my life with Apple has been this - promise, expectation and failure to deliver as it is always 3rd party apps that we need, and this is where it always seems to go wrong [not as good as their windows counterparts].
I believe that Apple need to develop / buy an 3D app that works for product design / architecture / 3D art etc that is quick, efficient, stable and has great output. Maybe just buy Rhino and combine with octane, as I don’t think those guys have the money or resources to really move it forward. Or Blender..... or whatever !
In the meantime I will try and make my decision on what PC to buy for my primary work computer. And I emphasise ‘work’.
Apple needs to branch off Blender, license Octane, revive Phenomenon, somehow acquire Allegorithmic / Substance Suite from Adobe, and integrate it all with Final Cut Pro X & Logic X into the be-all end-all Digital Content Creation software suite...!!!
US$1,999.00 - single seat, unlimited GPU / GPGPU host rendering, three network render licenses (plus host for a total of four network machines licensed for distributed rendering)
US$499.00 annual maintenance
It really isn't much of a pain to switch. You can learn everything you need via sporadic Google searches in a month at most. If you know how a personal computer generally operates (and you clearly do) you'll be able to find your way around. Not at all like having to pick up something like Debian from scratch.
If you can learn how to use Cinema4D surely you can learn how to use File Explorer and the (clumsy) Windows Control Panel, which is about all you'll ever need on a dedicated workstation. And if you live mostly in one or two applications, all you really need to do is remember to hold Ctrl instead of ⌘ for your hotkeys.
The real question is, what's going to take longer? Learning a new OS or waiting for Apple / everyone else to get their business together?
vel0city literally started this thread, and I replied to their post:
So I think that response is a little inappropriate.
Thanks for this, really appreciated. The biggest concern for me as a solo freelancer is troubleshooting. Provided I keep a clean system (no pirated software, no dodgy web browsing etc) is Windows 10 relatively stable/reliable? Nick Vegas of GSG didn't take to his PC too well and I think troubleshooting was one of his bugbears. Using the OS doesn't phase me too much, it's running a system for work that I can depend on. So whilst running 2x 2080tis is a dream for me, the time saved rendering might be offset with troubleshooting and the anxiety of an unfamiliar system. I have no political or religious fervour for Apple and the Mac, it's just what I know and all I know. Before Apple, I grew up with the Amiga, C64 and ZX Spectrum.
What @Hps1 said about Windows' font rendering is a concern as well. Is that just on an OS level, or is font rendering poor in Adobe CC etc?
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@vel0city I totally understand your frustration, and I’m sorta in the same boat. I’ve used a Mac since the OS 8 days and love the platform, but have been hovering over a PC build since Nvidia announced their departure. Your exact reservations are what has been holding me back. I have a friend in the IT business who HATED Macs, until he got a client that was 80% Mac, finally got himself one, and then realized he spent 90% of his time managing the PC users. I’m just too busy to spend time troubleshooting drivers, and yes Windows is ugly, and does HiDPI poorly. That stuff matters to me.
I think their are options for dual employment. Nick from GSG (who also said he’d switch back in a heart beat once GPU rendering is possible, even if it is a performance hit) has been using Parsec to control his PC from his iMac. I’ve been using something similar, JumpDesktop to control my Macs. It’s actually super speedy and totally usable on a local network, and Cinema is a lot of fun to use on an iPad with an Apple Pencil. (C4D is actually really touch friendly already. Way more so than any of the Adobe apps.) Leave the PC in the corner (or better yet, stuff it in a closet with proper cooling and sound proofing), do your work in macOS, and load C4D in the screen sharing app just like any other application. Lock the PC down to only receive LAN traffic and you never have to worry.
The Mac Pro was really underwhelming, but I think a lot of that is due to Intel dropping the ball. I can’t believe they put that much R&D into a case redesign with so much cooling for this to be a one and done Intel product. What kind of Apple Silicon chip can fit in there? How can some of the other ML functions of the AS help in the 3D world?
Apple has a HUGE incentive in keeping 3D going on the Mac for AR. Maxon’s S22 feature demos were all done on macOS. The changeover to Apple Silicon can bring performance jump we haven’t seen in a long, long time.
Choosing the tool that works best for you doesn’t have to be a religious conversion, or forever. Building a PC to get work done now doesn’t mean you can’t switch back to Mac OS when the AS transition has made its way to the Pro line and things smooth out.
With everything going in the world on my family retreated to the lake house for the summer. The only way I‘ve been able to make it work is having unlimited LTE data on my iPad and using the Apple ecosystem tools of Airdrop, Handoff and super easy tethering. I could probably make the same thing work with a PC workstation, but it would have taken a lot more effort, and has made me appreciate the OS a bit more.
I’m lucky that I’m on a long term archviz gig and have managed to make the Corona renderer work for me. Corona is really is unsung. It’s a nice transition from Physical, and still really fast and powerful. I’m planning on squatting on my iMac Pro and putting whatever Big Navi card comes out in the fall in a eGPU, and waiting this thing out. I know some of you circling the airport on 5,1’s don’t have the same luxury, especially since it will not run R23 or whatever gets announced soon due to AVX support.
@vel0city I’d love to keep this forum to Metal render progression, but would love to follow a guide for transitioning to PC from macOS without all the hate, and see other people’s 3D builds. I’d suggest making a new thread and starting a discussion there. It’d be a great place for other folks to share insight and not have 14 pages of other comments to weed through to get to the pertinent content.
Good luck on the journey. I think it is an exciting time in both 3D with realtime rendering becoming a reality, and the Mac platform with all the changes coming soon.
I think their are options for dual employment. Nick from GSG (who also said he’d switch back in a heart beat once GPU rendering is possible, even if it is a performance hit) has been using Parsec to control his PC from his iMac. I’ve been using something similar, JumpDesktop to control my Macs. It’s actually super speedy and totally usable on a local network, and Cinema is a lot of fun to use on an iPad with an Apple Pencil. (C4D is actually really touch friendly already. Way more so than any of the Adobe apps.) Leave the PC in the corner (or better yet, stuff it in a closet with proper cooling and sound proofing), do your work in macOS, and load C4D in the screen sharing app just like any other application. Lock the PC down to only receive LAN traffic and you never have to worry.
The Mac Pro was really underwhelming, but I think a lot of that is due to Intel dropping the ball. I can’t believe they put that much R&D into a case redesign with so much cooling for this to be a one and done Intel product. What kind of Apple Silicon chip can fit in there? How can some of the other ML functions of the AS help in the 3D world?
Apple has a HUGE incentive in keeping 3D going on the Mac for AR. Maxon’s S22 feature demos were all done on macOS. The changeover to Apple Silicon can bring performance jump we haven’t seen in a long, long time.
Choosing the tool that works best for you doesn’t have to be a religious conversion, or forever. Building a PC to get work done now doesn’t mean you can’t switch back to Mac OS when the AS transition has made its way to the Pro line and things smooth out.
With everything going in the world on my family retreated to the lake house for the summer. The only way I‘ve been able to make it work is having unlimited LTE data on my iPad and using the Apple ecosystem tools of Airdrop, Handoff and super easy tethering. I could probably make the same thing work with a PC workstation, but it would have taken a lot more effort, and has made me appreciate the OS a bit more.
I’m lucky that I’m on a long term archviz gig and have managed to make the Corona renderer work for me. Corona is really is unsung. It’s a nice transition from Physical, and still really fast and powerful. I’m planning on squatting on my iMac Pro and putting whatever Big Navi card comes out in the fall in a eGPU, and waiting this thing out. I know some of you circling the airport on 5,1’s don’t have the same luxury, especially since it will not run R23 or whatever gets announced soon due to AVX support.
@vel0city I’d love to keep this forum to Metal render progression, but would love to follow a guide for transitioning to PC from macOS without all the hate, and see other people’s 3D builds. I’d suggest making a new thread and starting a discussion there. It’d be a great place for other folks to share insight and not have 14 pages of other comments to weed through to get to the pertinent content.
Good luck on the journey. I think it is an exciting time in both 3D with realtime rendering becoming a reality, and the Mac platform with all the changes coming soon.
The bigger gap that Apple and macOS has is at the foundational library level; not the apps. Apps which don't have the resources when drawing on Windows ( and possible Linux/Unix) users along with macOS users to move things forward likely will have even less resources if cut those non macOS sources of income off. Yes, Apple as a whole has a Scrooge McDuck money pit. But any more burrowed out of that has to be repaided. Buying a software company and then dropping most of its paying users is not likely to produce a higher return on investment.
Shake is an example of Apple buying primarily a Windows app and trying to push it into some other direction. didn't work. There is decent chance the DarkSky acquistion isn't going to work all that well either once cut off all the android users ( and possibly pressure data collected from their phones as well as the revenue stream. )
Apple selling fewer Macs into a niche space isn't a good coupling with buying up the niche software in the now even smaller pond. Decent chance that would scare even more software devs out of the space and be left with even more brittle, monoculture ecosystem.
Blender has adopted and GPL v3 in some aspects (including distribution) which means Apple won't touch it with a 50ft pole. Apple might indirectly contribute some hardware to the project's Mac port efforts but in terms of Apple folks contribute or Apple trying to wrestle away rights to blender from the owners. Better chances of a meteor strike on the Apple space ship campus than that happening.
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Blender .. no way.
Get into a 'death match' wrestling contest with Adobe with with one of their assets??? Not. going. to. happen. Paying Adobe too much to take something away from them is extremely unlikely to bring any decent return on investment at all.
Apple needs more suites (from different vendors ) to make the iMac Pro - Mac Pro class systems more viable over the long run; not fewer.
Apple could do with paying to get some configurations and optimization done to get some more software "certified" by configuration. But acquiring and/or just funneling 'blank check' money into smaller players probably won't work well long term if there aren't enough customers.
Apple has about zero interest in > $1K software. Most of their past software acquistion moves have been to take packages out of that space; not to populate that space with more options.
Again. Not even remotely close to Apple's historical or current strategic objectives. ( subscriptions? Yes. Relatively very small number with triple-quad-quin digit pricing to offset the small number? No. )
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I was SO close to buying PC instead of the Mac Pro, but I’ve just heard so many bad/disturbing things about Windows, and I like macOS so much I decided to wait it out. Certainly for the money I dropped on the MP I could probably have bought a killer PC, and there’s certainly a niggle of regret. But I don’t do this professionally, just mainly for fun, and so overall speed isn’t that important - i much prefer having a nice environment to work in. Everything I need runs on macOS, and new apps are ported all the time. The PC versions might runs faster or smoother, but I doubt I’d notice. A working (and stable) version of Octane will certainly be a very nice addition to my setup.
I'm a real pig on my Mac, installing stuff just out of curiosity, fumbling with kext's and changing OS preferences all over. My PC is sparkly clean in comparison. Seems necessary to keep it working well. And zero web browsing on the PC. Put a firewall on it and block all traffic both ways and then only open up local connections and the essential stuff (licensing servers, etc).
For work you won't need the MS OS updates which seem to cause issues fairly regularly. Compatibility on Windows is much better: you can keep it running unchanged (and in my experience trouble-free) for years and only update the applications you use for work.
I can't speak to everyone's experiences; I've been using Win/tel PCs since the 90s and OSX since the Intel switch in 2005. Moving wholesale to a new platform isn't something I've had to deal with in a long time aside from some light dabbling in the *nix world.
What I can tell you is that for my own purposes (primarily Adobe Photoshop / Illustrator / Indesign /AfterEffects / some Resolve) my relatively budget PC has been more than solid. Certainly I have fewer issues on Win10 then I have on Catalina, although that OS is a messy outlier for Apple. You never have to use the command line for anything and system settings are searchable, as they are in OSX.
- Font rendering is fine. I say that as someone who has to build custom typeface solutions regularly. The new Windows Font system settings are (finally) modern and reliable, after many years of having to use the awful legacy typeface manager.
- Color management - provided you stay within creative applications - works fine too. I use a wide-gamut 4K display and browse my assets through Bridge or the legacy Windows Photo Viewer, both of which honor color profiles. Explorer and Chrome don't, and that sucks. I use SpectraView for my main (hardware calibrated NEC) display and DisplayCal to profile the others. Same as on my Mac.
- Being able to display scale to non-integer ratios (eg. 150%) is handy when you have a mix of displays at different resolutions. Once in a while you'll be faced with a very ugly window that doesn't scale properly, but I can't even remember the last time that's happened - probably something archaic like the Administrative iSCSI tool.
- 10-bit color support via regular GeForce Studio Drivers is a great step forward from Nvidia, meaning I don't have to shell out for a Quadro card and can put those resources elsewhere.
- I use Windows PowerToys to help manage windows and search for running processes using a keyboard, not unlike Spotlight (or Alfred before it). Spotlight is clearly more polished, though. The window drag-to-snap tool is extremely helpful.
- I miss Expose, Preview, and a more consistent (non-bifurcated) Settings panel. Finder / Explorer is basically a wash for me. Sometimes I miss the 'tree' view for folders and files.
- Being able to use functionally any PCIe hardware I could ever want or need is a pretty big deal.
But I am a working professional that relies on a reasonable, performant OS and hardware solution for my own work. It's just becoming increasingly hard to justify being a second-class creative citizen when modern Macs cost so darn much, so I really recommend people who aren't scared of a new experience to try the other side of the fence once in a while and not be afraid to see what options exist for them.
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Personally I don’t mess with ‘hacks of non-supported os’s, kext mods for non-supported gpu’s, installing apps because there free’.
Which is why my mac has been trouble free for 10 years.
I can say without a doubt, the best computer I have ever owned....
Personally I don’t mess with ‘hacks of non-supported os’s, kext mods for non-supported gpu’s, installing apps because there free’.
Which is why my mac has been trouble free for 10 years.
I can say without a doubt, the best computer I have ever owned....
Mac wasn't what I was getting at though - only problems I've had on that is hardware failures. But if you do all that on Windows it's bound to be messy. Even just installing/removing enough programs/drivers or installing a particularly intrusive one like a copy-protected game can bork the OS there. Easiest OS to screw up in my experience (dating all the way back to Win NT 3.51).
Redshift will probably only be released with the release of Big Sur, because since the release of 10.15.6 there was no new information. we will see if that is happen. Only that they think Big Sur will it make working because of some metal compiler problems and amd driver issues. Octane X will probably be released next week for Catalina. But I don't believe that until then. I have more confidence in the Redshift programmers. We'll see how stable Octane X runs when Redshift says that a compiler bug in Metal forces them to wait. Whether that will be acceptable to Otoy just to get a head start is a question.
We will see "soon" probably. I can't hear that word anymore either.
But I'm still glad that the Mac will continue and that developers will continue to work on it and not give up.
I'll test Octane X as soon as it is released and we will see how good it works on my Mac Pro with a Vega Pro II Duo with 64GB Vram. I am really curious.
all informations are on each of their forums.
We will see "soon" probably. I can't hear that word anymore either.
But I'm still glad that the Mac will continue and that developers will continue to work on it and not give up.
I'll test Octane X as soon as it is released and we will see how good it works on my Mac Pro with a Vega Pro II Duo with 64GB Vram. I am really curious.
all informations are on each of their forums.
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Octane X could see a release today, if bug testing over the weekend went well. Whatever OTOY needed in Metal, it's now there with 10.15.6.
Octane X | PR1 is out for macOS Catalina!
OTOY, Inc. is very proud to launch the first public preview of Octane X on macOS, introducing the leading unbiased GPU renderer to millions of Macs powered by Apple’s Metal graphics technology - and delivering the industry’s fastest OctaneBench score ever recorded for a single board graphics card
Pre Release is out. Unfortunately it still takes a while until I get my license.
"Octane X | PR1 is available today for current OctaneRender Studio and Enterprise subscribers. In the coming months, a full commercial version of Octane X, with one year of maintenance, will be made available – for free – to all new users activating Octane X on 2019 or later models of Mac Pro, iMac and MacBook Pro running macOS Big Sur."
So not just free for 2019 Mac Pro users...
So not just free for 2019 Mac Pro users...