[ptaszek]

Hello Maxwell team,
Do you have any plans to support Metal GPU rendering in the near future?
Best,
Mac

[luis.hijarrubia]

Developing a GPU engine is really hard. We want to improve the current one and implement the missing features before starting a new one.

[pjmc377]

Octane and Redshift are already developing their renderers for Metal in light of the fact that Apple dropped Nvidia and Nvidea will no longer support Cuda on Mac.
If Maxwell wants to slip even further down the list than they have, they will ignore this as they have other things.
I for one will move to redshift or Octane if Maxwell slips behind again, and Maxwell has been my main renderer since its Beta days.
Apple are very influential in what they support and don't support. remember when they dropped Flash while every website was using it ? how many flash websites do you see today ? none. I hope Maxwell doesn't fall behind the curve again.

“OTOY is incredibly excited about the all-new Mac Pro and how it will empower our users. Octane X — the 10th anniversary edition of Octane — has been rewritten from the ground up in Metal for Mac Pro, and is the culmination of a long and deep collaboration with Apple’s world-class engineering team. Mac Pro is like nothing we’ve seen before in a desktop system. Octane X will be leveraging this unprecedented performance to take interactive and production GPU rendering for film, TV, motion graphics and AR/VR to a whole new level. Octane X is truly a labor of love, and we can’t wait to get it into the hands of our Mac customers later this year.” — Jules Urbach, CEO and founder, OTOY

Maxon
“Tapping into the amazing performance of the new Mac Pro, we’re excited to develop Redshift for Metal, and we’re working with Apple to bring an optimized version to the Mac Pro for the first time by the end of the year. We’re also actively developing Metal support for Cinema 4D, which will provide our Mac users with accelerated workflows for the most complex content creation. The new Mac Pro graphics architecture is incredibly powerful and is the best system to run Cinema 4D.” — David McGavran, CEO, Maxon

[pjmc377]

Developing a GPU engine is really hard. We want to improve the current one and implement the missing features before starting a new one.

So you want to lose another two or three years ? haven't you already fallen behind the pack enough ?

[dmeyer]

Octane and Redshift are already developing their renderers for Metal in light of the fact that Apple dropped Nvidia and Nvidea will no longer support Cuda on Mac.
If Maxwell wants to slip even further down the list than they have, they will ignore this as they have other things.
I for one will move to redshift or Octane if Maxwell slips behind again, and Maxwell has been my main renderer since its Beta days.
Apple are very influential in what they support and don't support. remember when they dropped Flash while every website was using it ? how many flash websites do you see today ? none. I hope Maxwell doesn't fall behind the curve again.

“OTOY is incredibly excited about the all-new Mac Pro and how it will empower our users. Octane X — the 10th anniversary edition of Octane — has been rewritten from the ground up in Metal for Mac Pro, and is the culmination of a long and deep collaboration with Apple’s world-class engineering team. Mac Pro is like nothing we’ve seen before in a desktop system. Octane X will be leveraging this unprecedented performance to take interactive and production GPU rendering for film, TV, motion graphics and AR/VR to a whole new level. Octane X is truly a labor of love, and we can’t wait to get it into the hands of our Mac customers later this year.” — Jules Urbach, CEO and founder, OTOY

Maxon
“Tapping into the amazing performance of the new Mac Pro, we’re excited to develop Redshift for Metal, and we’re working with Apple to bring an optimized version to the Mac Pro for the first time by the end of the year. We’re also actively developing Metal support for Cinema 4D, which will provide our Mac users with accelerated workflows for the most complex content creation. The new Mac Pro graphics architecture is incredibly powerful and is the best system to run Cinema 4D.” — David McGavran, CEO, Maxon

To be fair, flash died because iOS didn't support it (and other issues), not because OSX didn't support it.

Apple certainly sounds very excited about their efforts to resurrect their line of pro machines, and metal support sounds great. At this point its just announcement-ware though until we actually see strong, shipping support from software vendors. I'm old enough to remember when OTOY told us OpenCL was the path forward.

The "pro 3d on mac" market is pretty tiny as it is.

[feynman]

Apple still makes computers?

Last I looked at their 10-K annual report, I thought it is the largest overseas bank that also sells mobile phones, apps and entertainment?

[luis.hijarrubia]

I'm not interested in a Mac vs other systems war. But I was working webpages when flash died, and from my point of view, flash died because HTML5 with CSS3 was so good that wasn't needed any more. You could do any animation on the page itself, no need for a third party plugin, send people to install it before running the web, no black box of code on your website, no more huge vulnerabilities on windows. Apple helped that the transition was faster as they stopped supporting flash. But we were already moving there.

The case of graphics I see it complete contrary. We all hope for a standard on gpu computing, but it doesn't seem near. Nvidia won't let amd or intel implement CUDA, that is the best library. OpenCL is almost dead, apple didn't upgrade it on mac for 8 years or something like that. And metal is only mac, so is like you need specific implementation for each system, and that's somethimes too much for small companies. And let's not talk about mantle... Maybe vulkan is the future altough is more raster graphic oriented than gpu computing.

[T0M0]

And what about CPU engine ?
It is still in development (new features, optimization, making it faster) or are you mostly focused on GPU now ?

[ptaszek]

T0M0 that’s very good question. I also would like to know it. CPU it is still more stable option especially in automotive where you need to render 20-40mln poly and more just for a car. I am also interested in CPU since latest Mac Pro offers high core count options or maybe one day switching to Windows + inexpensive threadripper (I hope not)

[luis.hijarrubia]

And what about CPU engine ?
It is still in development (new features, optimization, making it faster) or are you mostly focused on GPU now ?

Well, more than if, is when. If we plan new features, now we think about doing them for CPU and GPU, it make non sense to make engines more different. Optimization first step than can improve CPU engine is on preprocess, voxelization... That will make better both worlds. A future option for me (and I recall for me, it's not anything planned yet), it to make CPU code (and I mean code, not algorithm) more similar to GPU one. That would make code easier to fix, mantain and make new things, and probably will make code faster on systems with lot of cores.

[Lebenzet]

CG Artists working on Mac, as I am, are maybe not legion, but we are here. And my work is displayed here on the maxwell website, on the front page.
Originally, I chose Maxwell because of its MacOS support ! And I fully support you from the beginning (I supported the beta version).

I really hope you're seriously considering working on Metal support ! Please do.
I really love Maxwell but I'm starting look after Corona to reduce my expensive CPU renders cost.

Julien BENEZET

[Matteo Villa]

Why spending 60.000€ for a top tier Mac Pro when you could build a most powerful workstation around a Threadripper 3990x with dual 3090 for 12.000?

If you render on Mac in 2021 you’ve some real issue in financial economy and even in evaluate performance/$ on the long run.


Completely agree on the fact Nextlimit have to don’t loose another train or people will leave them for another rendering software.

But reading people investing in Macpro in 2021 .. man this is your first problem.

[Bernd Voss]

I have now been working with Maxwell for years, which at the time was the best solution for the Mac for me. My Mac Pro from 2009 is still working perfectly and has been upgraded with an NVIDIA graphics card with 11GB. Unfortunately, the GPU rendering cannot be used with my system configuration. One crash follows the next. I lose the time that the GPU renderer saves me in several ways due to the crashes of Fire, Maxwell and Sketchup. According to the support, the GPU rendering is not been tested on Macs because Apple no longer supports NVIDIA. How can I trust Next Limit as a Mac user for the future?
I have now installed VRay for testing. Everything works fine, so far not a single crash I also have the impression that the interaction between CPU and GPU is much better. The updates of the previews feels much smoother and faster.
I think that's it with Maxwell!
A shame