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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Chicken/egg. NVidia tooling is lacking surely in part because the hardware wasn’t usable on macOS until now. Now that it’s usable that might change.

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Nvidia GPUs were usable on Intel Macs, but compatibility got worse over time, and Apple stopped making a Mac Pro with regular PCIe slots in 2013. People then got hopeful about eGPUs, but they have their own caveats on top of macOS only fully working with AMD cards. So I've gotten numb to any news about Mac + GPU. The answer was always to just get a non-Apple PC with PCIe slots instead of giving yourself hoops to jump through.

The 2019 Intel Mac Pro had PCIe slots. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro still has them as well, but they’re pretty much useless.

Nvidia tooling like CUDA has worked on AArch64 UNIX-certified OSes since June of 2020: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-aarch64/

The software stack has been ready for Apple Silicon for more than a half decade.

Until there is official support for Mac coming from nvidia, I don't think anything will happen.

> the hardware wasn't usable on macOS

This eGPU thing is from a third-party if I understand correctly. I don't see why nvidia would get excited about that. If they cared about the platform, they would have released something already.

The eGPU "thing" should work on anything that supports thunderbolt as it has native support for pcie.

The point is that if nvidia cared about Mac platform they would have done something to make eGPU usable on Mac a long time ago.

Even on Intel Macs using eGPU with nvidia cards was near impossible. nvidia just doesn't care about it after the breakdown of the two companies' relationship.

Whether a third party has created a signed driver or not doesn't matter much until there is more interest from the GPU maker. This barely moves the needle.

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