Blender Begins Testing Metal GPU Rendering on M1 Macs
The free and open source 3D creation tool Blender this week began testing Metal GPU rendering for its Cycles renderer on M1 Macs running macOS Monterey. Blender said Metal support for Macs with Intel and AMD GPUs is under development.
Metal GPU rendering for Cycles
can be tested in the Blender 3.1 Alpha and was made possible by a contribution from Apple, which
recently joined the Blender Development Fund to support continued development of the 3D creation tool.
Blender said Metal GPU rendering in the Alpha build "is in an early state" and no timeframe was provided for the final release of Blender 3.1.
Apple's support for Blender has been praised by users of the 3D creation tool, as it marks the return of macOS as a completely supported Blender platform. Blender had not supported GPU rendering on Macs since Apple implemented its Metal framework.
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Top Rated Comments
PS: This means support for Intel macs as well, because we’re talking about the graphics API, which is shared among all macs
There’s also the benefit of thermals. On a regular PC and especially in the laptop space, powerful GPUs generate a lot of heat which then causes major throttling. The M1 chips stay cool which allows for peak performance for much longer.
Some of the time improvements are insane already.