Blender 3.5 Boasts Working Apple Metal Backend, Vulkan Still In Early Stages

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Blender 3.5 Boasts Working Apple Metal Backend, Vulkan Still In Early Stages

In addition to Blender's back-ends for NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX, Intel oneAPI, and AMD HIP, Blender 3.5 is set to have a working Apple Metal back-end for that proprietary graphics/compute API...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blender-3.5-Metal-Working

[peterdk]

Note that this is something else then Cycles support. So, Metal already was supported for that. This is for rendering the UI and viewport.

[RejectModernity]

The next step will be adding a DX12 support and deprecating openGL. Opensource we deserve.

[V1tol]

The next step will be adding a DX12 support and deprecating openGL. Opensource we deserve.

I did not know "opensource" means "mummification in 1990s"

[Naquatis]

I did not know "opensource" means "mummification in 1990s"

That must be the reason why Blender runs much faster on Linux

[stargeizer]

Apple not only donated to the BF, but also collaborated with one of their own developers who wrote the Metal backend for Blender. That's why they do support it first.

The Vulkan backend is done at a more glaciar pace, since it's harder to code for DCC. Blender devs have stated: "Although this doesn’t seems to be a lot of work, keep in mind that 10 times more lines of code needs to be written for Vulkan than OpenGL; even to display a triangle on the screen. And in case of executing this for Blender you won’t be able to see any pixels, until the final phase of the project."

And for the reason Blender is Faster on Linux than on Windows, there are 2 reasons: First, Blender for windows is compilled with Visual Studio, and it's native compillers. Is a known fact that MS native compillers produce slower code than GCC (but still faster code than LLVM). Also on windows GPU calls have to go thru the WDDM, and that adds some overhead to GPU operations on windows. That's also the reason some games runs faster on linux, despite the Proton/Wine Layers overhead.

[timofonic]

It's sad Metal is more funded than Vulkan, Khronos Group needs to have stronger efforts to actively promote Vulkan.

[stargeizer]

Is not that they don't promote it, it just that they promote it where their main audience target is: Games. DCC's are on their own to code and workaround all the vulkan limitations on 3D design software: Sillicon Graphics developed OpenGL for DCC applications, games were not their target at the time. Vulkan was developed with Gaming as its main target. Is a different paradigm.

[kpedersen]

Vulkan Still In Early Stages

I maintain a personal fork of Blender 2.49b (Not the old interface before the last change, but the one *before* that) and I have bastardized it to use my MiniGL wrapper layer which sits upon Vulkan.

Yes, the more recent Blenders are magnitudes more complex but it is nice to know that I beat them to it ultimately

[stargeizer]

Yup. is far more easy to write a OpenGL 1.3 to Vulkan wrapper than write a OpenGL 3.xx to vulkan wrapper.

An about the older 2.4x interface... well is not that different from microsoft's Ribbon (Since Ribbon was inspired partially by Blender's 2.4x interface). But working without EEVEE or even Cycles-X at this time seems to be kinda prehistorical to me... Well, to each it's own