I can’t express how disappointed I am after watching the entire Houdini 22 keynote.

For three years, the number one feature I’ve been hoping for has been proper Metal support in Karma for Apple Silicon Macs.

The keynote started with a beautiful macOS demo and the new UI, which briefly gave me hope that macOS was finally being treated as a first-class platform. Unfortunately, that hope quickly faded.

Despite all the impressive new features in Houdini 22, there was not a single mention of Karma GPU rendering on Apple Silicon, Metal acceleration, or any roadmap for native Mac GPU support.

Apple now offers powerful hardware with hardware ray tracing and enormous unified memory capacities. Yet Houdini users on macOS are still restricted to CPU rendering while NVIDIA users continue to benefit from major GPU advancements.

At this point, the lack of progress is becoming difficult to understand. Houdini on Apple Silicon has matured significantly, but Karma still feels like an unfinished story on the Mac.

For me, this was by far the biggest disappointment of the entire Houdini 22 announcement.

While I understand your disappointment and I also feel it to. I do want to mention that at the very end with the full list of changes there was a Mac Os improvement. They have better support for MoltenVK and the viewport experience itself.

Lol nobody uses mac. Any reasonable man uses nvidia gpus. There is no competition. I don't know any serious 3d artist who uses MacOs

I’m guessing this is something that will take time. It does look like they are giving Mac some more love.

It’s a missed opportunity. With AI companies consuming huge amounts of NVIDIA hardware and NVIDIA’s attention shifting more and more toward the AI market, relying on a single GPU ecosystem feels increasingly risky.

Supporting Metal and Apple Silicon in Karma would not only benefit Mac users, but would also help diversify Houdini’s hardware ecosystem and reduce dependence on a vendor whose priorities are no longer centered on graphics professionals.

I am still holding out and will continue to do so for XPU GPU support on Mac via Metal. I understand it's a resource issue when the industry is primarily on Windows and Linux for production. In the meantime, I got a Windows laptop with 5090 and use HQueue from my MacBook Air for remote GPU viewport via Render Gallery and HQueue-based final rendering. It's not ideal but it works. I'm hoping I don't lose too many Houdini 22 COPs features on my Mac, we'll see.

Yes it is disappointing. I actually let my Redshift license lapse because I was sure that 22 would be a unifying update. Redshift is just so much faster than Karma on MacOs, because they do support the GPU cores. I really don't want to use Redshift, the procedural primitives, super responsive workflow etc are just so important for my workflows but I'm losing a huge chunk of speed by using Karma.

Even some kind of experimental, not 100% compatible Beta/Alpha release would really help the Mac community out.

My guess is that when the Vulkan engine can be added to karma as a backend(i think they are on it).
With a sold Vulkan Engine you could support AMD, Intel GPU's in one go. Apple Metal over MoltonVK.

What a ridiculous topic - again! :-D

Sidefx never hinted even in the slightest that Karma GPU/XPU will come to Mac, not H22 or even if it ever comes. They did not comment further on it.
Jeez. It took them over 5 years from Karma XPU Beta to the current state which they comment as ready for all productions! How the hell can anyone make decisions out of wishful thinking and cancel subscriptions for a renderer they are using right now? And who the hell wonders anyway why Sidefx isn`t doing it? Karma GPU/XPU and even more as users on Mac as of now probably is primarily the obvious choice for indie users, as studios seem to rather use Redshift, Renderman etc. There also literally is not one Renderfarm service anywhere on the planet which runs on the allegedly superior Mac hardware (lol) - afaik (please correct me if otherwise) which means, no Mac renderfarms = no large volumes of Mac render licenses. So why should Sidefx allocate substantial ressources to port and support a platform which won`t generate any additional substantial money, at least right now???

If there was anything to be slightly disappointed at, it should be that Karma Realtime is still not there - even though it was hinted at at least 1-1,5 years ago. But even that was not promised but just hinted.

I think it would help to get official stance on this from
sideFx. That way no one is expecting anything and hoping.

Just for clarity, I didn't cancel anything, I just let it lapse, now I will buy another license.
Karma is definitely not as niche as you make it out to be, many large vfx studios do oyu Karma, as a mac user you can not contribute efficiently.

I do agree it is wishful thinking without a formal response. The idea is also not to have Mac render farms(althoug way back when this was very common), but to have a unified system. If I use redshift, there is no issue working between different OS, that's what we need.

Keyshot also just announced that you are able to use Mac hardware, so does Octane, so does Redshift. I am definitely not claiming, and I don't see that being claimed anywhere, that mac has superior hardware but Macs are used in production and it would be better if we can fully use the software we pay for.

Macs in VFX studios are nearly as rare as hen's teeth.

But with SideFX aiming to get to delivering final pixels with Vulkan, then sooner or later we'll all win; I'm keen on getting AMD GPU support, and since AMD GPUs also support Vulkan rather well, that would be a big winner all around. But also not a small task.

Macs in Motion Design, advertising and show visuals are a lot less rare.

Most of the market for Houdini is VFX, and almost every VFX house is Linux/x86/nVidia based. So that's always going to be SideFX' priority, at least until SideFX decides that Karma XPU is sufficiently mature to start optimizing for other platforms.

The sooner the better, IMO.

for mac rendering it's blender all the way.

and blender has geometry nodes, so i use houdini a lot less now.

22 isn't going to change that it seems, but fair enough.

this will probably never happen... like Arnold GPU KarmaXPU is built on top of Nvidia OPTIX API (why it took 5 years and not 10-15), they'd have to rewrite the engine to get it working on anything other than Nvidia GPU's. It also means unless the OPTIX API supports it, KarmaXPU won't - e.g out of core geo on XPU.

About the “unsuitability” of Apple Silicon for Houdini and 3D: myths vs. real-world experience

I don't know how things are in the fresh Houdini 22, but I'm sure they are even better there. I can speak specifically about how things are in H21 on Apple Silicon. I hope this closes the questions of those who still live by stereotypes.

1. Viewport (OpenGL vs Vulkan)
Right after the release of H21, there were indeed graphical bugs in the Vulkan viewport, and the good old OpenGL seemed more stable and faster, so I used it myself and advised others to do the same. But recently I tested Vulkan on one of the latest builds — all display bugs (like highlighting selected edges) have completely disappeared, and the viewport itself became maximally responsive and smooth.
As for the limitations in the SOP context, perhaps only the Texture Mask Paint tool really doesn't work on macOS. I haven't encountered any other limitations during my entire time working with it.

2. How a $700 box “bent over” a $4000+ setup
And now the most interesting part — why I completely moved my development to Apple.
Initially, I got a base Mac mini M4 just as a TV box. I had no thoughts of running heavy software there. But just out of curiosity, I installed Houdini on it. My main workstation at that time was a desktop PC with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (128 GB RAM) + RTX 4080 Super. A setup costing over 4 thousand dollars.
I couldn't believe my eyes and re-checked the tests several times. This little box performed incredibly cool in CPU-oriented tasks. The “phone” ARM architecture digests algorithms and OpenCL computations much more efficiently than heavy x86 hardware. The only area where the Mac mini predictably felt weak was viewport.

3. Bottom line
After this test, my life was never the same. I went out and bought a top-tier MacBook Pro with M4 Max with 128Gb unified memory — and I'm happy to this day. The same goes for working in modern Blender: it feels like you're sitting not at a laptop, but at an expensive Threadripper computer with 512 GB RAM.
It's great that Houdini 22 brought its own improvements for Apple. But personally, no one will ever be able to tell me again that Houdini or 3D runs poorly on Apple Silicon. The fairy tales that Mac is “not suitable for graphics” are a thing of the past.

4. Everything I wrote does not apply to the Karma renderer since I don't use it. But of course, I would dream of seeing a Metal backend for Apple. However, I am a realist and understand why this won't happen. Apple is a closed ecosystem, and it is not in their interest to work on Vulkan support. And support from SideFX for both Vulkan and Metal is a very difficult task, since the architectures are very different, and making some kind of universal layer for both Metal and Vulkan is impractical.

To wrap up the thought on why there is no Metal in Houdini's viewport and Karma XPU, it's actually very simple. Take Cinema 4D as an example. Historically, Cinema 4D's user base included a lot of Apple users, so they built a Metal backend first. Accordingly, for Metal to appear on macOS Houdini, there needs to be a sharp increase in the number of Mac users. I think I've answered the question of why Karma XPU won't support Metal as a backend. I might be wrong, but it seems pretty straightforward.
And the developers shouldn't be blamed for this.

You'll be happy to know that we continue to optimize for Arm platforms, both on the Apple silicon side and now on the Linux side as well.

Houdini 22 contains a number of improvements for Apple silicon that should make it even faster.

johnmather
You'll be happy to know that we continue to optimize for Arm platforms, both on the Apple silicon side and now on the Linux side as well.

Houdini 22 contains a number of improvements for Apple silicon that should make it even faster.

That's awesome. It really feels like Houdini is a better fit for ARM architecture, at least for CPU-bound tasks.
I hope x86 will no longer be the priority platform, at least in the future.