GPU rendering on Mac

Rhino Rhino for Mac
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@nathanletwory Just curious - what’s the story here?

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Rhino 6 on the Mac only supports CPU and OpenCL, Rhino 7 on the Mac currently only CPU. The Cycles devs found it increasingly hard to have good OpenCL on the Mac due to lack of support for the technology from Apple - pretty much same story with OpenGL

CUDA we never got even working on the one Mac with Nvidia GPU we have, so I was never able to even test that. Therefor not enabled. Nvidia and Apple also parted ways. And no doubt the transition to ARM is going to be painful as well. Not looking forward to it.

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Got it. Thanks. Looks like Apple is dead set on heading off to their own completely different ecosystem. Maybe their own planet. And after all the effort you folks put into going cross-platform. I noticed that in the WDDC reveal that Big Sur is supposed to include “virtualization”, specifically mentioning Linux. How does Metal fit into this, if at all?

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I suppose we need Metal for two different things: replacement for OpenGL, and replacement for compute (OpenCL/CUDA). For the latter I know there is some effort to get Cycles working on Metal. Not very coordinated yet, but may become something useful hopefully in the not too distant future.

For OpenGL replacement we’ll have to see what @stevebaer and @jeff can come up with.

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I have high hopes for Octane, we just need a bit more patience, as they have recently released the first RC.

Cheers,
Rudi

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Radeon Pro Render should also be a good option once it is out.

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It’s been out for some time! I have it up and running in Blender 2.83 on macOS!
It’s High Sierra (10.13) and Mojave (10.14) exclusive for now, I believe!

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He is talking about Radeon for Rhino.

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Oh, got it! :slight_smile:

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Hi @nathanletwory,

I just found out that in Blender 2.9 experimental there is a new option to have a CPU denoise in the viewport based on intel embree which is quite fast and I thought it would be very interesting to have this on the Mac due to the lack of GPU support at the moment. Do you see this coming to Cycles for Rhino?

Thanks,
José

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There will be three denoiser plug-ins available for download, probably from food4rhino and/or the PackageManager: Nvidia Optix denoiser, AMD denoiser, Intel denoiser. These should be available also for the Mac - at least Intel and AMD I think.

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Thanks Nathan, sounds great.

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How to Octane X fit into their product line? I’ve had a look on their website and it seems to barely be mentioned.

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According to this page it is: https://develop3d.com/sponsored/radeon-prorender-for-rhino/

But I’m struggling to see any mention of Radeon Pro Render for macOS? Is that what @nathanletwory was referring to? It would be interesting to know if any timescales have been stated for when it and Octane are expected.

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@Joshua_Kennedy has been working on getting it running on MacOS as well. I believe this will be for Rhino 7.

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Yes, as Nathan said it is running on MacOS as well. The ProRender version I’ve been working on will be for Rhino 7. I believe that article refers to a previous version of ProRender that was integrated into Rhino 6. I can’t give you a timeline on when it will be released, but as Rhino 7 stabilizes you might hear a more about it.

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ASCII Render

Things are getting complex. When all is said and done and everything became über complex we return to where it all began - ASCII. So when will there be an ASCII Render mode in Rhino?

// Rolf

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