Apple Pledges Support for 3D Graphics Tool Blender

Thursday October 14, 2021 8:38 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

Blender today announced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund to support continued development of the free open source 3D graphics tool.

Alongside a contribution to the Development Fund, Apple will provide engineering expertise and additional resources to Blender and its broader development community to help support Blender artists and developers, according to the announcement.

Blender CEO Ton Roosendaal said the announcement means that "macOS will be back as a complete supported Blender platform."

First official patch submitted by Apple: Metal backend for Cycles GPU rendering on macOS. https://t.co/DdHP6u8znp — Ton Roosendaal (@tonroosendaal) October 14, 2021

Blender said its Development Fund accepts donations "to support activities to provide free and open accessible services for all Blender contributors," including bug fixing, code reviews, technical documentation, and onboarding.

The fund will also provide grants and subsidies to developers on generic and widely agreed development projects, according to Blender.

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Top Rated Comments

terminator-jq

64 months ago

This is pretty big news actually and could open even more doors for GPU rendering on Apple silicon allowing Apple computers to compete in a space normally ruled by Nvidia (with CUDA). The timing is very interesting too... announcing this just a few days before the big M1X event. I wonder if Blender will have an appearance during the show to help show off the GPU capabilities of the new chips. Also makes me wonder if we could see some raytracing abilities on the larger M1X (Jade C Die).

Score: 25 Votes (Like | Disagree)

batmanofvietnam

64 months ago

This is huge for Mac blender users. The lack of GPU rendering is an enormous problem!

Score: 25 Votes (Like | Disagree)

chrono1081

64 months ago

Apple didn’t want to lose their last 3D creation tool still used on their platform haha 😂 Seriously all the serious 3D tools aren’t used on Mac

Yes they are. Maya, Houdini, Zbrush, Mari, Substance, and more all have Mac versions.

Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)

kalafalas

64 months ago

Gotta get blender and cycles Metal and arm ready before the M1X benchmarks drop

Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)

_Spinn_

64 months ago

This is fantastic news. Blender is a great tool. I wonder if this has anything to do with Apple's AR ambitions?

Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)

ryanmillercg

64 months ago

So apple plans to pivot MacBook as GPU rendering machine now? Not to say it’s a bad thing but I guess gaming on Mac will never catch up with Windows PC.

Wonder how much it would do in 3D modelling world and how it competes against windows and Linux.

Local GPU renders for development (yes, even with cycles) is part of an artist workflow that doesn't require extended rendering times. Even 3D Artists working on beefy RTX Windows machines will use cloud render farms for long batch renders. Mac is perfectly competitive in the 3D modelling space; Blender, Maya, Zbrush, etc all run great on Mac. I think it's unlikely that Mac will be looking to challenge high-end GeForce GPUs, but I'd love to be wrong about that.

Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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Apple Pledges Support for 3D Graphics Tool Blender

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