![]() However, as we’ve seen before, if Apple decides to change the graphics API or perform some over major shift, it could be a long wait before Blender gains the appropriate support. As Windows makes up the vast share of users you can guarantee that the Blender developers will continue to maintain support and add new features for the Microsoft OS. You can still run these programs on mac by way of parallels (the best windows VM for Mac) but it’s still more hassle than using a PC.įinally, future proofing. Personally, I’ve found many photogrammetry programs are only available on windows, and many AI open-source projects are also windows only too. Whilst Blender is fully compatible with macOS, other CG programs you may want to use are not. Whilst that’s plenty for most situations, for high level work especially simulations, professional CG artists can have half a terabyte or more of ram. Not only do Apple charge 3-4 times more than the amount it would cost to buy the equivalent PC memory but again with the top of the range Mac Studio the most Ram you can choose from is 128gb. It’s not just the slower GPUs that cause problems, ram is an issue too. No matter how much you spend on your Mac, a PC will always be faster. However, even the top of the range Mac Studio M1 Ultra (a £5000 computer) is 5 times slower than a 3090. With programs such as DaVinci Resole, the Apple Silicon GPUs can keep up with their PC equivalents. Unfortunately, there are still several disadvantages to using Blender on macOS, even if we ignore the tradition Mac vs PC arguments such as price, upgradability and repairability. ![]() So now that Blender is fully compatible with macOS should we except to see a significant increase in the number of Mac Blender users? Not necessarily. Best of all for Mac users, these improvements finally enabled support for Apple’s Metal API, both for Apple Silicon computers and for the older Intel based computers too. ![]() It didn’t take long for everyone to notice that the list of programs included Blender.īlender version 3 brought several exciting features, most noticeably much faster Cycles renders. Apple clearly anticipated this, and along with announcing Rosetta 2 to translate x86 programs to ARM, they also revealed they would be contributing code to various open-source programs. Many were worried this switch to a whole new ARM based architecture would be a compatibility nightmare. Then everything changed when Apple unveiled their latest computers, powered by their own in-house processors ‘Apple Silicon’. For the time being, I was stuck with CPU rendering only. As someone who had just spent £3500 on a brand-new iMac with an i9, 32gb of ram and an 8gb Vega 48 GPU this was extremely frustrating. So why are the majority using Windows, especially when the percentage of Mac users is much in higher in areas such as video editing, photo editing and music production?Īs I previously mentioned in this post when Apple dropped support for OpenGL in favour of their new graphics API ‘Metal’ this made GPU rendering incompatible from Blender 2.8 onwards. ![]() In 2020 there were nearly 12 million Blender downloads for Windows but only 1.4 million macOS downloads. Most Blender users have Windows Desktop PCs and Windows Laptops.
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