Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristianp | Hacker News Reader

Still no Nvidia cards?

There are lots of stories about Apple’s difficult relationship with NVIDIA, e.g: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management...

Honestly I feel like reading that just leaves me confused. There have been some rough spots, but it seems like it's much less contentious than the relationship between Apple and Samsung, and Samsung still makes iPhone displays.

Thats because Samsung owns the IP and the expertise to make OLED displays which no one else makes. Its not a choice.

Samsung made Apple panels long before OLED was used in iPhones.

hell they dropped Nvidia support awhile ago and Nvidia stopped making drivers earlier this year that could be used. I had a 2013 model with the Nvidia 780m chip that I was holding onto since I bought it in hopes of a new Nvidia based system but alas that did not come. Then suddenly early this year my github script reported no compatible drivers after an OS update and by June it was quite evident we were not going to get them,

so but a refurb BTO to replace the 2013 model, stuck with ATI but at least the screen appearance is a big jump for me, my model was the last on the non retina models

Still no Nvidia drivers.

Doubly sad for those for us who like hackintosh.

Lots of people are holding out for Navi support.

Anyone who wanted Nvidia already left Apple's ecosystem in the Mac Pro trashcan era, and honestly wont want to look back.

If your workflow and machine are built around CUDA thinking back to before you had that setup you wonder how you ever got anything done.

exactly how I felt. My last mac pro was useless to me without CUDA.

There is open CL now which blender and other programs have started using. Hopefully the lack of nvidia cards in these mac pros means proprietary tech like cuda gets left behind.

Apple is ending support for opencl, too.

this is darkeness

It’s seems like they went all in on AMD a few years ago, so I assume they have a bunch of long term agreements that lower the price?

It’s more irksome to me that they don’t have a high spec non-pro desktop.

Eg I want high end consumer desktop GPUs, not high end mobile GPUs (afaict that’s essentially what iMacs use). But my alternative appears to be “pro” GPUs with their absurd - for a consumer at least - markups and Xeons, which no one really wants ;)

eGPUs have been supported for a couple years now. Grab a Mac Mini, an eGPU, max out the RAM, add an external hard drive or two, boom, your ‘pro consumer’ Mac for about $2k.

Just don't get an nvidia GPU for your eGPU solution.

Sure, and that must be frustrating to an extent. My 2018 MacBook Pro’s GPU does well enough for my purposes with my HTC Vive, so I guess I’m not in the market.

Disable System Integrity Protection so you can use an eGPU. What could go wrong? :)

I’ve never had, nor will I have, SIP enabled on any of my dev macs. There are too many things I just can’t do out of the box.

First terminal command I run on a clean install.

Mac Mini with an eGPU might be a decent option.

I'm close to going dedicated windows/ubuntu computer with an nvidia card for ML & gaming and a mac mini hooked into a KVM on the same screen. But not having allowed nvidia drivers in 10.14+ is a disappointment.

I’m currently running a VM with a GPU passed through and moonlight on my Mac for gaming. It’s really nice, my old MPB isn’t doing any real work so it easily lasts for hours if on battery, and the VM doesn’t eat up all the resources on my server so I’m free to do whatever I want to with everything else.

My only real issue is I occasionally get slowdowns while playing which causes things to stutter. This is most like partly to blame on using WiFi for the Mac and partly to blame on using only a single port NIC for the server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com