Question for V-Ray team about Apple M1 GPU

[photohomka]

Hello, guys!

First of all I want to thank you for such a great product as V-Ray! Really love it.

Do you have any plans to add Apple M1 GPU support? Like Blender has already. This is a huge step forward for Mac users and a huge render times reduction.
I have a Mac Studio Max with 32 GPU cores which are not used at all.

Looking forward for your answer.

[photohomka]

Is there anybody out there?

[sirio76]

I'm not aware of Chaos plans about Metal support for the GPU renderer, but this question has been asked many times and I think the answer is still the same.
Probably there are no plans because:

-It will need a total rewrite of the GPU engine to work with Metal
-The user base is too limited to justify the cost of development
-Metal GPU(not really a GPU since M1 is an SoC) still lack dedicated RT hardware acceleration

I will add that recently I have tested Octane (that is M1 ready and you can get for free with new Mac hardware) and to be honest I do not see large benefits compared to the speed of Vray CPU.
Personally I'll be happy to see the GPU cores used for things like real time denoiser, a native GPU engine may be useful for people working with motion graphic.

[photohomka]

I'm not aware of Chaos plans about Metal support for the GPU renderer, but this question has been asked many times and I think the answer is still the same.
Probably there are no plans because:

-It will need a total rewrite of the GPU engine to work with Metal
-The user base is too limited to justify the cost of development
-Metal GPU(not really a GPU since M1 is an SoC) still lack dedicated RT hardware acceleration

I will add that recently I have tested Octane (that is M1 ready and you can get for free with new Mac hardware) and to be honest I do not see large benefits compared to the speed of Vray CPU.
Personally I'll be happy to see the GPU cores used for things like real time denoiser, a native GPU engine may be useful for people working with motion graphic.

I see. But if we take Blender as an example I can get from 4 to 5 times faster render speeds using M1 Max Gpu rendering. So benefits are quite noticeable.

[sirio76]

I see. But if we take Blender as an example I can get from 4 to 5 times faster render speeds using M1 Max Gpu rendering. So benefits are quite noticeable.

That’s because Blender CPU engine is not as fast as Vray CPU and benchmark scenes are very simple and tend to favor GPU renderer, Vray is very optimized to run on CPU (including M1/M2) and here on my Ultra it runs great and extremely stable.
CPU and GPU engines speed are not easily comparable since there are so many differences, in Vray a top of the line GPU can be twice as fast as a top of the line CPU, that being said depending on the scene performance may vary quite a bit and a CPU maybe faster and viceversa.

While I do not personally need a GPU engine is still good to have options so I hope that developers will consider to port the GPU renderer to Metal, as far as I know Apple have dedicated developers and financial resources to get Redshift, Octane, Cycles etc to run on Metal so maybe Chaos can take advantage of that too.

[photohomka]

Any comments on this from Chaos team?

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Not in the near future and this is subject to change, say if Apples releases stronger chips in future and there is more demand. For now V-Ray GPU works only with Nvidia GPUs..
sirio76 is also right on the reasoning, it takes a lot of resources to adapt to Metal API. Right now we have big plans for V-Ray GPU, it is best to focus our resources on speed/features. Again this is subject to change in the future
We are aware that Octane/Redshift/Cycles have invested in this direction, it took a lot of time and effort. We are aware of the current state of these products, I have been using personally, I can say it is far from being production-ready.. after years of development(or from a value point of view to existing Nvidia GPUs). To date, I don't know of any studios or individuals using GPU rendering exclusively on Apple M1 hardware.

Best,
Muhammed

[photohomka]

Not in the near future and this is subject to change, say if Apples releases stronger chips in future and there is more demand. For now V-Ray GPU works only with Nvidia GPUs..
sirio76 is also right on the reasoning, it takes a lot of resources to adapt to Metal API. Right now we have big plans for V-Ray GPU, it is best to focus our resources on speed/features. Again this is subject to change in the future
We are aware that Octane/Redshift/Cycles have invested in this direction, it took a lot of time and effort. We are aware of the current state of these products, I have been using personally, I can say it is far from being production-ready.. after years of development(or from a value point of view to existing Nvidia GPUs). To date, I don't know of any studios or individuals using GPU rendering exclusively on Apple M1 hardware.

Best,
Muhammed

Thank you, for your answer.
Now it’s clear to me that it’s not worth waiting for Apple M GPUs support in the near future. Sad news.

To date, I don't know of any studios or individuals using GPU rendering exclusively on Apple M1 hardware.

Maybe this is because there is no NVIDIA support on Macs for years and no new Apple GPU support neither?

In any case, thanks for the detailed answer.

[Phillip Miller]

Thanks for your interest on V-Ray GPU running on Apple GPU hardware.
We examine each technology platform very seriously for our solutions and aim to support the ones that give the most benefit to the most users. We do this carefully, as each platform carries with it an additional level of development investment and support that impacts our capability for already supported platforms. We most recently added ARM support to continue serving the Apple community. While this was a sizeable effort that keeps all of our solutions available for Mac users, it's not nearly the same effort required by a new programming language (Metal) for (optionally) conducting GPU-compute processing (uniquely) on Apple's new processors. We are keeping an eye on this area, and are looking for the point where the number of people using M#'s and really needing GPU acceleration make it a win-win for the development effort and ongoing support it will require. In the mean time, we have numerous V-Ray GPU customers using MacOS in combination with DR or network rendering on Linux or Window where they are free in their choice of GPU hardware, and we are committed to keeping this working.

>>no NVIDIA support on Macs for years
FYI, this is was actually Apple's choice to exclude NVIDIA - first in what they included in their hardware, then in what they allowed as after-market sales, and then in constraining EGPUs.

Kind regards

[photohomka]

FYI, this is was actually Apple's choice to exclude NVIDIA - first in what they included in their hardware, then in what they allowed as after-market sales, and then in constraining EGPUs.

This was not a complaint against you. I know that Apple made this mess. But now, when they began to have sufficiently productive GPUs my question about their support is quite logical.
I understand your arguments about the cost of development. As it is clear that Apple GPU support is not worth waiting for now. Thanks for the detailed answer.

[hsz]

oh man it kind of sucks to hear this from Chaos. The new M3 Max are quite capable, is almost the same as to have one 3080RTX. Redshift is release a new build that will take advantage of the new Hardware Raytracing acceleration of the M3s ... I hope this really change in the future.