Gian Marc Cadosch

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 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.

It‘s a pitty that it is not available for MacOS. That was never mentioned in the presentations. I‘m now thinking about animating them in UE.