It's the year 2019. We communicate with the speed of light across the ocean and manipulate DNA, but installing drivers is still not a solved problem on Windows...
... and a modern display server is still not used by default on Linux.
... and a modern display server is still not used by default on Linux.
nVidia used to ship third party Mac drivers for their newer cards, but they decided to stop maintaining them a couple years ago, possibly because Apple said they wouldn't sign them them†, depending on how you interpret vague PR statements. Still, the third party drivers work on slightly older OS's—I'm currently typing this from a macOS High Sierra machine that has a GTX 1080 Ti.
† I want to note that driver signing isn't some draconian Apple thing, 64 bit versions of Windows also require signatures. You can install unsigned drivers on macOS by partially disabling SIP, but presumably nVidia didn't want to ship drivers that would require that.
The only thing that works is Metal, on purpose.
I know the GTX 1080 works on High Sierra, but that OS is at (or near) the end of its supported life.
Microsoft manages the driver signing process but doesn’t play these games. If nVidia wants to write and maintain drivers for macOS, why get in their way?
> Apple fully controls 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.
A lot of people have decided to interpret this as "Apple is refusing to sign nVidia drivers", but I'm not ready to jump to that conclusion without more explicit details.
For example, nVidia has continued to release drivers compatible with High Sierra security updates (necessary because nVidia driver coded their drivers such that they'll refuse to launch on non-whitelisted build numbers). Apple has not suddenly refused to sign those drivers.
My personal theory: in Mojave, all desktop compositing goes through Metal, so nVidia would have needed to a major rewrite of their drivers. Given how few Mac users install third party graphics cards, this isn't worthwhile for nVidia. nVidia wants Apple to implement some type of legacy shim in macOS that drivers can plug into, and Apple characteristically said no.
That, to me, makes more sense than Apple suddenly deciding not to sign any drivers which are compatible with 10.14+.
Not only that, the cost of implementing a Metal frontend is trivial for NVIDIA.
It took about half way through to realize they just meant a UI change... kind of surprised they bothered with an announcement.
I'm pretty sure that continues to work as of at least win7 where one can go into the device manager and click hardware without drivers and install/activate most things without rebooting. Or upgrade/switch drivers for a piece of hardware. Its only if windows fails to stop the device does it request a system reboot. Probably the biggest problem, are the stupid little monitoring utilities that some vendors provide that open the device and never respond to device state change requests.
Still happens though. Thought they maybe had a clever way to make it invisible to more legacy software that forces reboots, or to make it so windows update never required one, or something similar new. That would be pretty amazing to me and worth an announcement. UI change, less so.
PS I also booted Ubuntu LTS Live CD and while it worked, hardware support was not very nice. Display FPS was set to 60 instead of 144 and after 5 minutes it turned display off and I couldn't turn it on. I guess, with enough tinkering those problems could be solved.
For most people, drivers are likely something they never deal with.