The latest release of Nuke changed a lot when it comes to being able to support the macOS system from our side. Since Nuke15.0 is natively compiled for the arm64 architecture, i.e. Apple’s M processors/silicon, and comes with PyTorch 1.12 internally bundled which supports being accelerated using MPS (Apple’s Metal Performance Shaders) it is suddenly possible for us to build compatible and accelerated plugins.
This is what we have primarily spent the last couple of months doing, i.e. building, adapting and testing NNSuperResolution, NNFlowVector and NNCleanup for Nuke15.0 on macOS. They all work well and we feel they are ready for a public release, which is very exciting!
However, it’s worth noting that the MPS support in PyTorch 1.12 is still very early, and hence the support is not fully fleshed out. This means that the MPS acceleration performs well is some situation and not so well in others. It works better for NNSuperResolution than for NNFlowVector as an example. This is however just a matter of time until it’s improved, because as soon as Foundry decides to update the internal PyTorch version that is shipped with Nuke, there will automatically be much better and updated support for MPS in general. Hopefully we will already benefit from this in Nuke15.1, time will tell.
Having noted the above, the only real difference that you will notice as an artist while using the plugins is that NNFlowVector on macOS will not accelerate the “AA” transformer based model for now (it will automatically switch to classic CPU processing so it will work, but just be very slow). Otherwise than that, it should all be very familiar to the use on Linux/Windows.
As a final note, to be super clear, you need to have an Apple M processor machine to be able to use these new macOS builds of the plugins (they will NOT work on older Intel based macs).
Happy compositing!
Cheers, David