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Comment by wjakob | Hacker News Reader

Lack of NVIDIA support is a deal-breaker. The AMD ecosystem is just so far behind when it comes to frameworks like CUDA, OptiX, cuDNN, etc.. Why can't Apple open up kernel-level support by cooperating more with NVIDIA? This state of things seems completely bizarre to me.

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I know this is an Apple/Mac discussion, but from a Linux/OSS perspective, it looks very different. If it weren't for CUDA, Tensorflow and so on, I wouldn't even consider buying NVIDIA (anymore).

Currently, I have a laptop with NVIDIA graphics and a desktop PC with AMD graphics. The AMD stuff just works; out of the box (OSS, good performance, happy user). But NVIDIA either comes with nouveau (OSS, poor performance) or the nvidia proprietary binary driver which has all sorts of weird issues (e.g. always-on fans, animations running at different speeds, etc.).

Sure, this doesn't say anything about how a Mac would run with NVIDIA drivers, but it gives a hint that NVIDIA has its own weak spots. But the reason why Apple decided to skip on NVIDIA in this case, is probably rooted deeper within their strategies.

There was an anecdote on a semi-recent (sometime this year) episode of ATP where an inside source related to them that nVidia were a terrible organization to try and work with. They apparently screwed Apple over, and Apple has a long memory for that sort of thing.

The AMD ecosystem will always remain behind if application developers continue to choose single-vendor proprietary frameworks rather than standard APIs.

This is an odd complaint considering the Metal requirement on MacOS.

I'm not happy about Metal either. There is at least MoltenVK…

Maybe it's NVIDIA blocking the way? If Linus is correct, then they are not a nice company to work with.

A member of NVIDIA's CUDA Product Management wrote in October 2018:

"Apple fully control drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14 (Mojave)." -- https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042279/cuda-setup-...

well that is sad then.. Maybe they want to push the Metal platform? idk.

macOS Catalina (10.15) is entirely built on-top of Metal. So, yes.

To hear Nvidia tell it, it's Apple fault. Weird how everybody who works with Nvidia has issues, though.

There's been a long-simmering hostility between the two companies. Broken down somewhat here: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management...

There was some sleight of hand in the benchmarking for me too, they compared GPU compute rendering engine speeds to "Nvidia Quadros" when no one doing CUDA rendering on Windows uses Quadro cards, they all use GTX because the price to performance is ridiculous on Octane render/Redshift/etc.

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