KeyShot Forum

Technical discussions => Extending KeyShot => KeyVR => Topic started by: m0dm0d on October 30, 2019, 02:50:11 PM

Title: Mac OS / AMD roadmap
Post by: m0dm0d on October 30, 2019, 02:50:11 PM
Hey Luxion team...

I just wondered... but are there any future plans to have the new KeyVR features working with Mac OS and AMD graphics cards anytime soon (should Apple continue to block Nvidia on Mojave / and who knows with Catelina)? 

I know KeyVR is Nvidia GPUs only right now ??? but I came to Keyshot originally back 2013 as it was a super friendly Mac OS option with CPU renderining, against all the GPU renderers out there – and I've stuck with it since (Network rendering is awesome)!  8)

With both Octane and Redshift promising compatability with the new Mac Pro due this fall, AMD compatability is coming... at which point, options for rendering may need to be reconsidered.  :-\

Don't know what I'm missing, but it would be great to know if there's a roadmap for KeyVR / or any other features with Mac users.  ;)

All the best! @m0dm0d
Title: Re: Mac OS / AMD roadmap
Post by: Furniture_Guy on October 31, 2019, 06:22:57 AM
Geez. You guys are certainly persistent...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)
Title: Re: Mac OS / AMD roadmap
Post by: KeyShot on October 31, 2019, 01:58:09 PM
We have asked Apple to help us support Mac OS with VR and GPU rendering. Unfortunately, Apple has deprecated support for not just NVIDIA hardware, but also for standards such as OpenGL. Apple does not support Vulkan, so any implementation would rely on Metal. It would be a significant amount of work to rewrite everything to support Metal and right now there is no hardware acceleration for ray tracing on Apple hardware. With the CPU implementation in KeyShot you still get very fast performance and it scales to complex models. For VR the support for headsets is also fairly limited on Mac hardware as far as I know. Both KeyVR and KeyShot with GPU rendering run on Linux, and it would be a straightforward recompile if Apple supported the open standards mentioned.
Title: Re: Mac OS / AMD roadmap
Post by: Joni on November 22, 2019, 11:10:07 AM
If you are considering to support Vulkan in the future at least for Windows environment, then it could be made to work with Mac for GPU rendering using MoltenVK (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK) ?
It would make support for eGPUs in Mac environment possible too.