What hardware and macOS versions are supported in PR1:
For PR1, we are supporting AMD Vega and Navi GPUs on macOS 10.15.6. We need 10.15.6 to support out of core memory, there wasn’t much point in releasing without it, so that was part of why we wanted to wait until it was out last week.
Intel and other GPUs will be coming in a future update for macOS 11. We will be keeping the closed beta group going to test macOS 11 builds on Intel and other GPUs.
\
…‘other’ GPU’s
seems like a Herculean effort from the OTOY and Apple graphics engineering teams.
As it currently stands: SketchUp needs OpenGL to run, no OpenGL no SketchUp.
As such it doesn’t matter if any rendering program (or any other program) runs 100x - 10000x faster using Metal or whatever other system, unless SketchUp is somehow adapted to use it, it is of no consequence to pure SketchUp use.
You are not making things clearer. You are conflating two totally different uses of API, in this case neither of which is co-dependant.
Yes, Sketchup uses OpenGL as its display graphics API. What API an external renderer like VRay, Octane, Twinmotion etc uses for GPU accelerated rendering is entirely separate.
You are confusing a GPU compute API use (like CUDA, OpenCL and Metal Performance Shaders) with a GPU graphics API (OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan etc).
The OP is about the first significant move forward in this industry sector adoption of Metal (and therefore Metal Performance Shaders) for GPU accelerated rendering (therefore GPU compute) for MacOS - which has been in a murky place for this sort of thing for some time.
Octane also has a Sketchup integration plugin (and has done for some years), hence its direct relevance and to the many recent posts in regards to GPU rendering options (or the lack of) on the Mac.
It benefits SketchUp users if they can run a faster renderer (GPU-compute API accelerated) and run SketchUp and have a SketchUp-integration plugin (to export mode to renderer).
This is the case as long as macOS supports both Metal (compute and graphics API) and OpenGL graphics.
The SketchUp integration plugin is little useful if Apple drops OpenGL before SketchUp is ported to run solely on Metal.
By the way, there is hope: SketchUp is not forced to endorce such solo attempts and rewrite the display engine from the ground. They could resort to a compatibility layer (for their current OpenGL implementation, or reimplement for the new industry standard Vulkan). The performance impact is little because both APIs (Metal and Vulkan) are thin and similar so that the heavier work still occurs on the GPU (with comparable performance).
It already does. And has done for some time. If you are running Mojave or later the Finder is running Metal, Sketchup is using OpenGl and my Vray interactive viewport is using CUDA. All at the same time, one of these applications is using GPU accelerated compute. The other two are using GPU accelerated graphics display.
But Apple has announced their intent to discontinue providing OpenGL. Of course, as discussed in previous posts in this topic a) that is potentially irrelevant to an external renderer, and b) there are non-Apple layers atop metal that would be an easier adaptation than rewriting SketchUp for metal. B is particularly apt because metal is not on Windows just as direct X is not on Mac. Supporting two completely different graphics would add complexity to SketchUp.
This is probably discussion for another topic TBH but it has been deprecated not discontinued. Big difference, the version will stay at 4.1 (I believe) but OpenGL apps will work for the foreseeable.
There are no plans to remove it currently - obvs this may change but TBH there has been plenty of notice in terms of encouraging a transition.
Apple recently announced a suite of Windows based tools for Metal development so PC based engineering teams can co-develop using there existing development infrastructure.