[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.