[goblin89]

In release notes[0] for Cycles there are a lot of mentions of CUDA. Also many mentions of OpenCL, with the ominous note that it’s been “disabled on macOS platform”.

I’m wondering how complex can animations be, with reasonable frame render times, on macOS with Radeon Pro Vega 16? I know it’s a very open-ended question but I’m curious for any take.

(For some context, I’m completely unfamiliar with the pipeline/ecosystem, but wanted to hobby around with 3D for a while. Lacking a suitable GPU, now I’m considering how viable would this be on latest MBP’s graphics. If not so much, I might go for a cheaper GPU option & postpone my 3D experiments until I can have a fixed workstation with fast GPU in addition to laptop I use for work.)

[0] https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/C...

[terhechte]

I used to use Blender a lot for a variety of things in the past. However, with 2.8, the UI became so slow on my Mac Mini that I decided to buy an external eGPU. However, I hadn't read the "OpenCL disabled on macOS platforms" update. So the eGPU didn't really help. So for me, I'm still on Blender 2.7 as the UI is much faster there. For reference, I have Blender running on a 5k display, so there're a lot of pixels to move around. Nevertheless, buying an eGPU won't help you a lot with Blender 2.8 as the internal GPU is too slow for the UI - at least in a reasonably high resolution. I was briefly pondering buying a second Linux box just to use Blender, but that also sounds insane. So until Apple patches their broken Nvidia relationship up, or Blender supports something like MoltenVK, there's no good way of running 2.8 on most macOS devices.

Edit: I didn't test the RC yet. So maybe the performance is better now. Also, I never tried on a smaller display. It might work just fine on a 1920x1280 screen.

[filipncs]

I can't imagine OpenCL in any way being involved with the rendering of the UI. Maybe you're confusing it with OpenGL?

If you're having problems making use of an eGPU (that's supported by apple, which rules out nvidia!), you should report that. eGPUs will probably be a common use case.

[ashleyn]

That probably has something to do with Apple's abysmal support for OpenGL. They have even deprecated it for their proprietary Metal API. From Blender's perspective supporting a proprietary API is not worth it.

[_Wintermute]

If you're just learning then new Eevee renderer in 2.80 is great for 90% of things and is pretty much real-time. For those final shots you can use cycles with your CPU, it's going to take longer but lack of a GPU shouldn't stop you as a hobbiest.

edit: after some more reading I'm not sure if Eevee works on CPU, but I don't have blender 2.8 on a cpu-only machine to test this.

[basq]

Eevee is a gpu only renderer.

[deckiedan]

The new 2.8 release comes with the Eevee "real time" 3d engine, which should work well with your current system.

If you need to use Cycles, it'll still work fine with your CPU for now - and you can always either use an online render farm (there are many!) for more complex stuff, or buy a separate rig if you end up using it enough.

[readbeard]

Yes, it is unfortunate that Cycles no longer supports OpenCL on macOS. There has been talk in some of the Blender groups about porting it to Metal (Cycles was designed from the ground up to support multiple platforms like OpenCL and CUDA), and they were speculating that it could be done by a skilled developer in 3–6 months [0]. Hopefully there are enough Blender users on Mac to justify this effort. Anyone here have ideas about organizing / funding this?

In the meantime, check out AMD ProRender [1]. It appears to be a viable alternative to Cycles for most things and can run on Metal on macOS.

At any rate, for more substantial renders, I strongly recommend cloud farms. You can make your own using spot instances to save money, and fire up more servers to get your render done more quickly. Getting an overnight render done in less than an hour (without tying up your workstations) is super helpful since it gives you more freedom to iterate. This kind of task (where you need a huge amount of processing power periodically for specific jobs) is where cloud computing really shines.

And there is also Eevee, which is not a Cycles replacement, but I believe it is fully supported on macOS.

[0] https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-Decem... [1] https://community.amd.com/docs/DOC-2183

[goblin89]

Thank you, had no idea about ProRender and haven’t thought of offloading the renders to EC2. Looks like using a spot P2 instance could be really cost-effective (if prices keep at reasonable levels), definitely worth trying first.

[gwhobbs]

There is a useful tool for this called brenda. The original repo by creator James Yonan hasn't been updated in years, so it uses an old version of Blender by default, doesn’t allow you to choose availability zone (which affects pricing), and doesn't support GPU rendering out of the box. I forked it [0] to address these issues for my own use, and updated the documentation to try and make it easier for people to get started.

[0] https://github.com/gwhobbs/brenda

[goblin89]

I actually saw brenda come up a few times while researching readbeard’s suggestions, as you said the original seemed not super up-to-date. Thank you for mentioning your fork! Going to try in the next couple of days.

Even if my experiments won’t justify spinning up multiple instances, this should greatly reduce setup overhead.

> to try and make it easier for people to get started

What do you think about putting a simple GUI in front of this toolset—for those not proficient with CLI (I imagine many 3D artists using Blender may fall into that category)? I’ve been doing something similar as part of a consulting job recently, so couldn’t help thinking along those lines… Would be happy to help make it more accessible, should be an interesting exercise.

[rnotaro]

http://brenda-web.com/# already exists for that. :)

I'm not sure about the compatibility with the fork but it should not be too hard to adapt it if needed.

[panpanna]

I think it's probably cheaper and safer to buy a second hand gpu rig and use it as your reneder farm.

With that said, your initial 3d experiments should run just fine on cpu only.