Blender 3.1 To Add Native Metal Support in Cycles

Last week, we reported that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support the core development of the toolkit.

"Alongside a contribution to the Development Fund, Apple will provide engineering expertise and additional resources to the Blender HQ and development community to help support Blender artists and developers," wrote the team.

The team also revealed that the first official patch submitted by Apple is a new Metal backend for Cycles. The change should improve GPU rendering performance on current Macs as Apple decided to use its own Metal API in macOS 10.14.

Previously, Redshift and OctaneRender have also already released Metal-native editions of their renderers. 

"We’ll bring a feature branch up with a fully Metal-enabled version over the coming weeks, as we tidy up the code and break it up into atomic commits that make sense for code review," said Apple software engineering manager Jason Fielder.

What other improvements should they introduce with future releases? Share your thought in the comments. Don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.