Jules Urbach's GTC presentation – lots of very interesting stuff in the pipeline!
https://developer.nvidia.com/gtc/2020/video/s22153
https://developer.nvidia.com/gtc/2020/video/s22153
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MP 7,1 GPU rendering on the new Mac Pro. News, updates, chat.
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You know, if I were one of the developers, I would be hesitant to devout my resources for the dated product line.
Unless Apple gives a clearer roadmap showing continuation of intel workstations like MP and MBP despite of their transition to ARM mac, I would hold off.
Unless Apple gives a clearer roadmap showing continuation of intel workstations like MP and MBP despite of their transition to ARM mac, I would hold off.
I see your point, but there are an awful lot of Intel-CPU machines out there – Apple's entire laptop and desktop line-up in fact – and there's no immediate guarantee of ARM-based desktops. Besides, I doubt the current ARM chips are powerful enough to replace the Mac Pro and iMac Pro any time soon.
Thanks for that link @skippermonkey - will check it out this week.
OTOY on Facebook:
"Closed beta for Octane X (XB16, non-osl build, for recent intel/AMD GPUs on latest 10.15.4) will open up to select octane users next week. It will include Octane X standalone + 9 DCC plugins + render slave, and OctaneBench X. We will post a sign up form in the forums shortly. Testers will need an existing octane Enterprise license, have existing octane CUDA MacOS experience to compare to latest octane X Metal, and also be willing to sign an NDA to enable us to share Octane X with 3rd party software/drivers that that may not be publicly released yet.
Octane X renders identically to Octane 2020.2+ in CUDA, so if you ever switch or want to put your cuda GPUs on a PC render slave - it would work."
Anyone here able to get on the beta and report back?
OTOY on Facebook:
"Closed beta for Octane X (XB16, non-osl build, for recent intel/AMD GPUs on latest 10.15.4) will open up to select octane users next week. It will include Octane X standalone + 9 DCC plugins + render slave, and OctaneBench X. We will post a sign up form in the forums shortly. Testers will need an existing octane Enterprise license, have existing octane CUDA MacOS experience to compare to latest octane X Metal, and also be willing to sign an NDA to enable us to share Octane X with 3rd party software/drivers that that may not be publicly released yet.
Octane X renders identically to Octane 2020.2+ in CUDA, so if you ever switch or want to put your cuda GPUs on a PC render slave - it would work."
Anyone here able to get on the beta and report back?
Sorry but I can never find anything twice on Facebook, it was posted by Jules in the Octane public group.
Beta now officially open for signups: https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=381067#p381067
So the future of rendering on Apple devices is...the iPhone and iPad?
www.facebook.com
Path tracing at 60FPS on an iPhone!
Selected replies from Jules Urbach, OTOY CEO:
"Running full Octane on your iPhone or iPad and leaving your laptop behind because it’s actually slower."
"it renders faster than my MacBook. Therefore I predict future devices built on this - like an iPad with mouse - that replace my MacBook."
"This is rendering a bit faster than the 2020 13” MacBook Pro with an intel iris GPU. At the very least your iPhone 11 would double the rendering power of your MacBook as a render slave"
"the next iPad will like have A14X which may be 3x faster than this"
So their plan for their users is to create on the Mac and render on iOS/ARM devices. For me that means a high-spec i9 iMac and an iPad Pro can easily replace a tower. Very exciting.
Insane progress from the OTOY team.
Just read this on OTOY's customer forum: "Mac Pro users with Vega II Pro Duo - you might have the highest Octane Bench score of any single slot card" - the Mac leading the way in realtime GPU rendering? Today is a very good day.
Octane Render | How fast is Octane X iOS/arm64 build on Metal | Facebook
How fast is Octane X iOS/arm64 build on Metal? Here is latest Octane X beta on an iPhone 11 - doing path tracing at 60 FPS on our public octane demo scenes. Full interactivity on par with desktop...
www.facebook.com
Path tracing at 60FPS on an iPhone!
Selected replies from Jules Urbach, OTOY CEO:
"Running full Octane on your iPhone or iPad and leaving your laptop behind because it’s actually slower."
"it renders faster than my MacBook. Therefore I predict future devices built on this - like an iPad with mouse - that replace my MacBook."
"This is rendering a bit faster than the 2020 13” MacBook Pro with an intel iris GPU. At the very least your iPhone 11 would double the rendering power of your MacBook as a render slave"
"the next iPad will like have A14X which may be 3x faster than this"
So their plan for their users is to create on the Mac and render on iOS/ARM devices. For me that means a high-spec i9 iMac and an iPad Pro can easily replace a tower. Very exciting.
Insane progress from the OTOY team.
Just read this on OTOY's customer forum: "Mac Pro users with Vega II Pro Duo - you might have the highest Octane Bench score of any single slot card" - the Mac leading the way in realtime GPU rendering? Today is a very good day.
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Hmmm. Okay, I admit this is all a bit confusing. Would love to see a genuine side-by-side comparison of speed between an iPhone 11/iPad/whatever, and a decent Nvidia GPU (or AMD), rendering the same scene at the same resolution to a completed, production-quality image.
Don't get me wrong, if I can plug my iPhone in and use it to add rendering power then great, but the idea of buying a Mac Pro was to leverage a bunch of internal GPUs. I'd quite like to get that bit running smoothly first!
Also, this was quite telling: Jules Urbach… "It took Apple moving heaven and earth to make Metal api work for us. Not sure when Vulkan and Android would get there - even desktop Vulkan is missing a lot other than Nvidia"
I've yet to see a desktop build of Octane render a production quality image! /s
Someone on the FB thread said his iPhone was rendering faster than his 2x 2080ti setup, but then someone shot back with the fact that the iPhone has a lower res display which would decrease render time. As you said, we need to see side by side comparisons.
For my money I think the usefulness of this (for now) will be for lookdev/styleframes/stills, a solid solution for people who need fast single core speeds (i9 iMac/MacBook Pro) as well as GPU rendering options for C4D. Scaling that up for production will require a Mac Pro or farm. But now we have options, which is the really exciting part.
No. What is this is more so illustrative is that few serious macOS developers are actively ignoring Metal. OpenGL and CUDA isn't the future of macOS development. It isn't. The graphics stack on iOS ( and tvOS , iPadOS , etc) are highly coupled to macOS.
Also probably illustrative that if throw away doing computations on "graphics elements" that no one can set with that set of equipment don't need fire breathing monster ,large GPU to do rendering. One of the principle keys to practical widespread AR/VR is throwing away what isn't necessary as the "everything is super high end gaming hardware" fans try to make it out to be.
Finally, context matters. ( driving what screen ? )
Except there isn't a 2020 MBP. At least not openly released. The MBA is 2020 but the MBP 13" is still essentially on 2018 hardware. ( a GPU whose baseline was laid down in 2016 era. )
Probably not. Their plan more likely is that more folks will create and render on the future iPad Pro's. There will still probably be roles for Mac to play but they aren't going to kneecap the iPad Pro.
The Vega II Pro Duo soaks up a width of 4 standard slots. Single slot card? Physically not quite. If throw the 4 slots ( two double wide with a backchannel interconnect between the cards. ) to make it "Apples to Apples" that may not hold up for long. The Mac Pro will be competitive. Distanced every other configuration; probably not.
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Or the MBP could trade up on GPU....
AMD Ryzen 4000 iGPU Almost Catches Nvidia's GeForce MX250
The GeForce MX250's days might be numbered.
Or when the iPhone 11 is driving that LG Ultrafine 5K at a faster rate than the laptop.
Apple could do a more than decent MacBook 2020 ( or iBook 2020 ) with what they have now but higher (large resolution ) pixel fill and I/O diversity has lots of gaps left.
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Perhaps a slim crack that OpenCL on macOS might get deprecation reprieve.
OpenCL is backtracking to the version 1.2 as the baseline. Apple has a working 1.2 so will be almost 'fall out of bed in the morning' easy for them to post up a "v 3.0".
The heavyweight bindings to C++ are all optional. ( which probably wasn't helping as doesn't line up with ObjC and Swift as being the primary players. ). Freedom to designate what Apple doesn't like as optional might open door for them to jump back on board with a reduced effort ( fix bugs , support limited effort to track SPIRV enough scaffold Molten /clspv on top ).
Interactive and/or 'real time' graphics Metal would still be dominate on both drawing and compute what is to be drawn. But batch compute may have more than just one singular option if OpenCL gets less balkanized with this reset.
That OpenCL had to bracktrack here only will deepen rift between Apple insistence of Metal being "first class" , "best effort" for their GPU device vendors versus any kind of attack for "embrace, extent , extinguish" move.
(chart in article. Nvidia's OpenCL 1.2 arriving around the same time as Mediatek and after TI's and 3 years after Apple.s is the kind of game Apple's isn'g going to play with Metal. )
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So it looks like 10.15.5 is moving closer to GM, I know Red Shift and OTOY have mentioned they need Apple to fix some Metal stuff before they can release. OTOY has users in a closed beta running on a modified 10.15.4. Has anyone heard if the Metal updates have been wrapped into 10.15.5? I don't see it anywhere in the release notes of the betas.
Radeon VII's seem to be getting pretty scarce. I'm thinking of picking one up to have on hand. The 5700XT doesn't seem like a huge improvement and it looks like it will be a while before Big Navi makes it out.
Looks like the VII only beat out the 5700XT in a couple of benchmarks and is 2x the cost, and has some fan issues. The 5700XT may be the better bargain.
Radeon VII's seem to be getting pretty scarce.
Looks like the VII only beat out the 5700XT in a couple of benchmarks and is 2x the cost, and has some fan issues. The 5700XT may be the better bargain.
2020 MacBook Pro 13-inch gets a boost from an eGPU
real world speed test results for performance minded Macintosh users
barefeats.com
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No, they never mention this stuff, but Jules Urbach was pretty transparent that they'd had to push Apple to make changes in macOS, and 10.15.5 is the release they've been waiting for before it can go public. Hopefully I'll be rendering on Octane again before too long. That was sort of the point of my new Mac Pro.
Still nothing solid from the Redshift devs, even on 10.15.5
From their forum today: "As always, we’ll make sure to update everyone when we have more news on the matter. At this point we’re waiting for some improvements on the compiler and driver which will help both with performance and stability. Whether these will be enough to kickstart a closed beta soon remains to be seen."
From their forum today: "As always, we’ll make sure to update everyone when we have more news on the matter. At this point we’re waiting for some improvements on the compiler and driver which will help both with performance and stability. Whether these will be enough to kickstart a closed beta soon remains to be seen."
It increasingly looks like Apple, at least in regard to Metal/ GPU-dependent apps, has heavily overpromised and heavily underdelivered.
I find it extremely displeasing that we’re close to the WWDC2020 with no fulfillment on promises made at WWDC2019. This was published on June 3, 2019 with none of them being ready by now https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019...react-to-the-new-mac-pro-and-pro-display-xdr/
It’s disappointing knowing that I bought a maxed out Mac Pro (2019) that till this day can’t do Octane X, Unreal Engine etc. because Apple didn’t do their part on delivering Metal-related fixes/ upgrades.
For my usage, the Mac (speaking overall) outclasses Windows machines on every front, but they gotta do better on commitment and expectations. It will be very hard justifying buying anything else on release day if that doesn’t get better.
I find it extremely displeasing that we’re close to the WWDC2020 with no fulfillment on promises made at WWDC2019. This was published on June 3, 2019 with none of them being ready by now https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019...react-to-the-new-mac-pro-and-pro-display-xdr/
It’s disappointing knowing that I bought a maxed out Mac Pro (2019) that till this day can’t do Octane X, Unreal Engine etc. because Apple didn’t do their part on delivering Metal-related fixes/ upgrades.
For my usage, the Mac (speaking overall) outclasses Windows machines on every front, but they gotta do better on commitment and expectations. It will be very hard justifying buying anything else on release day if that doesn’t get better.
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It's also a bit concerning that these companies are getting funding and support thrown at them by Apple specifically to get up and running on Metal, and apparently that's still not enough. It's just weird to me that we have a modular Mac Pro now with such limited use cases.
FWIW, many of the NAB 2020 announcements with MacPro7,1 support are trickling out. AVID is now certifying. Adobe now has some support for Afterburner. More will be coming. Apple was late with the original MP7,1 release and the pandemic didn’t help speed things up either.
I suspect 10.15.5 wasn't the release OTOY/Redshift was hoping for. This delay is now totally on Apple – OTOY certainly has done their work, and it appears so has AMD and Intel. Just lazy ol' crApple again...
