GPU Rendering on AMD cards (MacOS)

[peerman]

This would be my biggest wish for a next version. Why is GPU rendering tied to CUDA only? We are working with Macs that unfortunately don't support Nvidia cards. What is the reason behind not supporting GPU on Macs??

Regards,
Peter

[georgi.georgiev]

There are a few important changes in V-Ray Next concerning V-Ray GPU and the support for OpenCL (on all platforms) and Mac OS in particular.

As software developers our goal is to make our software run on as many platforms as possible, and as efficiently as possible. This benefits both our users and us. Historically we have been dedicated to supporting almost any open standard possible - OpenEXR, OpenVDB, OpenColorIO, OpenCL, etc.

V-Ray GPU has been the first - and mostly the only - renderer to support OpenCL for many years. In V-Ray Next we have removed support for OpenCL.

There are several reasons for this decision. First, most of the hardware and software vendors have decided to divest or deprecate their support for OpenCL.
1. Apple deprecated officially OpenCL with macOS Mojave
2. NVIDIA has never supported the modern OpenCL 2.0
3. AMD stopped investing in OpenCL too.

Second, as software developers, it is our responsibility to make sure that our users get the best experience possible and can utilize their hardware to the maximum. Unfortunately we do not believe OpenCL helps us with this goal.

With V-Ray GPU Next, CUDA rendering on Mac OS is still there, but its status is changed to “unofficial” for reasons we'll try to explain below.

Apple devices dо not come with NVIDIA GPUs installed and there is no official support by Apple for NVIDIA eGPUs on Mac OS devices. This makes it really hard for us to develop code and provide adequate support. We have tried the Metal API and currently it is not a viable option for our raytracing code. If this changes in the future, we will surely consider it. Until then, there's not much we can do.

[peerman]

Hi Georgi,

Thanks for the reply. I think Apple is indeed distancing itself from the 3d market. Especially when it comes to rendering on GPU. V-Ray and Twinmotion are my main rendersoftware applications. I decided that my next computer will be a Windows PC. After using Macs for nearly 20 years I'm returning to the other OS... Big step, but to keep up, I can't stick to a company that cripples it's computers. I'm not going to buy a Mac Pro that can't have the internal components I want (NVidia cards for one...). Next week I'm GPU rendering with V-Ray again! But on Windows, haha...
Thanks for developing this amazing render software, can't wait for RTX support for Sketchup as well!

Regards,

Peter

[peerman]

Thank you! Unfortunately CUDA drivers aren't released for Mojave and NVidia won't support it. Also the file config.json is not present in the folder as described in the documentation. Maybe something has changed after the .2 update?

[Valtiel]

That's disappointing but understandable. I'm a PC user on 3dsMax and came here on a forum search after noticing that CUDA and RTX are the only options for engines now (I guess it shows how often I use it). Murphy's contribution to my disappointment is that I just received a second AMD GPU with the hopes of having one do IPR while I work. I want to support AMD but I know how, over the years and since the earliest inception of VRAY RT, they've been completely unsupportive of applications in the 3D space. I remember checkered results in getting the old benchmark to run at all on my old 7970's and Vlado sharing CG's experience with AMD's next to zero developer support. It always seemed they only wanted to support professional workloads in tradeshow rhetoric.

Thanks, CG, for trying to make it work without AMD's support for as long as you did. I appreciate it. Looks like I'm switching to RTX for my next build.