The upcoming Blender 3.5 release now provides a Metal GPU backend on macOS builds!

Next to Metal-accelerated computing in Cycles, it is now possible to enjoy improved EEVEE viewport (and UI) performance as well. This functionality has been in the works for a while, and it can be enabled through the user preferences.

Currently, the default backend is still OpenGL, but the goal is to switch to Metal after a period of testing and feedback.

Currently, the Metal backend needs to be enable through the User Preferences.Around one year ago, after joining the Blender Development Fund and seeding hardware to Blender developers, Apple empowered a few of its developers to directly contribute to Blender. The contributions started with Metal for Cycles and then continued with Metal as a GPU backed, for EEVEE, and the UI system. The goal of these contributions is to provide the best Blender experience on Apple hardware, as Blender is moving on from OpenGL.

BenchmarkHere are the results of some benchmarks, performed on a MacBook Pro laptop with an M1 Max chip.

The render benchmark was run in two different scenarios. Pre-cache means that no shader was compiled and cached. This happens when rendering a frame for the first time. Cached means that the frame was rendered at least once before.And these are some results on Mac Studio with M1 Ultra chip.

Ongoing workBesides bug fixing, a few patches to improve support of AMD and Intel graphics devices are expected to be merged. Next to that, the main target is to introduce Viewport compositing support, which is currently not available on macOS. The progress can be followed on developer.blender.org.

Note for add-on developersWhile the ‘bgl’ Python API has been deprecated in favor of the ‘gpu’ API, it still “works” in current releases of Blender. The upcoming GPU backend changes (both Metal and Vulkan) do not support the legacy ‘bgl’ API.

If you are developing add-ons with custom drawing code, make sure you are using the gpu API.

Testing and FeedbackThe new backend is ready for testing! If you are using Blender on a Mac, download the daily alpha build from builder.blender.org and give it a try. In order to enable the Metal backend, open the preferences and select it from the options available. Please report any issues on developer.blender.org.

Congratulations to Michael Parkin-White, Vil Harvy, Marco Giordano and Jason Fielder at Apple for this contribution, and special thanks to Clément and Jeroen for reviewing and coordinating this large project.