@nathanletwory are there any plans on updating the Cycles Engine? it seems pretty speedy from what i just saw, cutting render times in half.
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I also read the news about it.
Very promising.
I assume it will land in Rhino at some point. I would be happy if this happens sooner than later.
There is much be done. We expect it will take at least 6 months until this work is part of an official Blender release.
I guess only after it is in an official blender release it can be expected to land in Rhino.
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Probably should be modified to read “the work to adapt to Rhino can begin.”
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From the blog, the most important line:
This is by no means a full reimplementation. As the blog post tells us a bit later on
Eventually I’ll get around to update to whatever lies in the future. While we wait for Cycles X to reach completion and maturity, in the near future you’ll see an update to the latest full Cycles implementation.
edit:
Checking the technical presentation there are still a lot of open questions to be answered.
It is also to be noted that the blog post mentions deprecation of the OpenCL kernels in Cycles, meaning that there is no support for AMD GPUs until a replacement technology is utilized.
That all said, the numbers look promising for rendering on Nvidia hardware.
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thanks @nathanletwory
digging up or lets say digging around for some info regarding Metal for Cycles for Blender i found no evidence for any intentions porting it, only some discussions where people try to convince each other endlessly, i might have missed something though.
since development for Metal for Rhino for Mac has started, would that cause issues or is there a way to connect Cycles to Metal for Rhino from your side?
Not for Rhino, and not for Cycles per se.
They are unrelated issues. Cycles will run fine on the CPU like it has on Intel Macs.
The kernels need to be adapted to compile on Metal, like they do now on OpenCL, CUDA and OptiX.
Huh? They are just going to ignore the AMD users? Can you say a little more about what led to this kind of decision, or at least provide some links?
as I mentioned, this is information from the blog post. At the very end there is a section called Deprecation…
Sounds like ProRender is the way to go for mac’s then. As newer mac’s don’t have nVidia cards nor drivers for them if I am right?
For now I suppose so.
On the Mac a Metal-based kernel will bring GPU rendering back.
It’s not about ignoring AMD users. They deprecate old stuff like OpenCL in order to fully utilize more modern approaches that support dedicated hardware which is meant to accelerate ray tracing. Nvidia has the RT cores for this. Since Navi2 aka RX6000 Series, AMD has integrated ray accelerators which are also found in the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft - for hardware ray tracing. AMD just needs more time to make these ray accelerators easily accessible. I’m no developer but I guess that AMD don’t jet has something like an Optix equivalent? For a very long time AMD simply did not earn money and had no resources for this stuff, whereas Nvidia made enormous amounts of money and they used it to employ lots of talent which lead RT cores, tensor cores, Optix etc. AMD is on a much better path now (see their financial report today) and they will invest more in this area for sure.
It is mentioned in the text that they are working with AMD (and Intel) to support their hardware as well and hint that it will be through newer APIs. So again and in short, this is not about abandoning AMD but about abandoning OpenCL (or embracing newer, more efficient APIs).
So Nvidia has Cuda and AMD and Intel will have their own unique API’s “real soon now” and McNeel can write their interface three times and the OpenCL dream of “one GPU API for all” has evaporated? Ah, well: time marches on. At least there’s OpenGL. Oh, wait… 
Everything free that has to be developed together by companies that compete with each other while they simultaneously develop their own stuff, is bound to hit walls every now and then. Hopefully hitting this wall will result in the need for new industry standards down the road. But Apple leaving OpenGL and OpenCL is a bummer for sure…
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Just want to drop this about the current status on cycles-x in here:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blender-3.0-Lands-Cycles-X
So AMDs CUDA/OPTIX alternative is called HIP? Will be very interesting to see how it performs in comparison when it will finally be usable.
I will be updating our Cycles in Rhino 8 to the latest and greatest.
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waiting for the m1x mac mini to be released, brace yourself, i finally will bore you to death with dumb questions from my side then 
if some arise. did not have any chance to use rhino 8 yet.
I am just getting started with looking at the Cycles X source code. It’ll be a few months before there is anything to test.
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then I will finally have a reason to try wip8 
There is an update regarding AMD support for Cycles X in Blender 3.0:
Yep, I have been following the HIP dlevice implementation progress.