The subject above and Ton’s message was about a Metal backend for UI, not Cycles.Īs someone who actually manages large projects, I’d actually disagree on that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. At worst, the Apple change “breaks” Cycles as a GPU supported renderer. When it comes to large software projects, a good rule of thumb is to not fix what isn’t broken. Outside the desire for a Metal backend, there isn’t a need to redo the UI level of code. If completely rewriting the UI level frameworks was an option, it wouldn’t be as much of a chore (proportionally speaking) to have a generic Vulkan/Metal backend. Given their re-emergence of embracing open source, why does blender write all its entire UI in custom opengl when there is a industry standard and mature alternative out there? Obviously viewports are a different matter as well as rendering back ends but it seems unnecessary to have to worry about how UI is drawn when there’s a good abstraction layer that is cross platform.įrom a project management standpoint… QT isn’t better. This whole discussion is about replacing the opengl code all over blender with metal? It seems there is a better solution in all this to me. FOSS is not as critical in that area when the apps. That said, I recently got an iPad for mobile gaming and in my opinion, that’s the one area where Apple has a serious advantage over the competition thanks to iOS and their high-powered CPU designs. This could change though if Apple decides to have a Vulkan implementation based on Metal, which Ton has hope for. If they were, they would give open source coders access to updated hardware. If they would, they’d work with the industry on getting decent Vulkan support for their systems. Blender Foundation has to pay for the Apple developer program (to sign binaries).Īpple is clearly not interested in supporting open source or cross platform openness in any way. My contacts within Apple can’t manage to get approval for sending us another system. Last thing for everyone to know: Apple took back our Mac Pro dev system loan last summer. to even have FOSS options for its users as evidenced by this final thought. Ton also is of the opinion that Apple is actually trying to make it more difficult for the Mac. users will likely see a degraded experience due to Apple not being supported of FOSS, as well as the huge overhead of creating and maintaining yet another graphics backend if the long-term goal leads to Vulkan (as Apple phases out OpenGL on their machines).

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