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Appleinsider explains why Macs don’t support Nvidia GPUs
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[Michael Gissing] “I see is that a company that has a small but niche OS”
You’re holding it wrong. Apple was 4th in hardware sales. Apple sells computers, not the OS. While fairly far behind the top three Lenovo, HP, Dell they don’t sell any lower priced the others do. I suspect Apple does very well in its price bracket. I don’t doubt video users (certainly those who make money from video) skew into the higher priced bracket as well.
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[Craig Seeman]”You’re holding it wrong. Apple was 4th in hardware sales. Apple sells computers, not the OS”
7.2% is niche in my book. Even if you add in the iOS share, Android is double iOS.
Yes I know they sell hardware which can ironically run Win and Linux. I wonder how many Macs are not just running the Mac OS. Either way the Nvidia issue is with their OS not the hardware. I don’t think I’m holding anything really, except with the lightest of hand.
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[Craig Seeman] “In tests that I’ve seen Resolve takes much better advantage of the AMD GPU on Macs than Premiere Pro. That would be Adobe’s intransigent.
“I don’t see Adobe as being intransigent. They are willing to change. They have changed. They’ve done a lot to get non-CUDA performance to be much closer to CUDA performance because their users asked for it. Comparing Adobe to itself (CUDA vs OpenCL vs Metal) on the same platform is the only Apples to Apples comparison, right? Not having the fastest render on the Mac is just not having the fastest render on the Mac. I don’t see it as a sign that Adobe is suborn or acting like it’s their way or the highway since over the years they’ve greatly expanded the GPUs that people can use in order to get hardware acceleration (form a small selection of Nvidia GPUs to basically any GPU that meets some pretty basic hardware specs).
Of course this whole issue would be moot if Apple would just allow Nvidia’s drivers to work with Mojave instead of only supporting their first party API, Metal.
[Craig Seeman] “You’re holding it wrong. Apple was 4th in hardware sales”
Platform vs platform shows that Apple, per your graph, has about 7.2% of the market while non-Apple PCs have 92.8%. And of that 92.8% I’d guess at least 90% of those non-Apple computers run Windows. So to Michael’s point, Apple is a small player in terms of user base.
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[Andrew Kimery] “Platform vs platform shows that Apple, per your graph, has about 7.2% of the market while non-Apple PCs have 92.8%. And of that 92.8% I’d guess at least 90% of those non-Apple computers run Windows. So to Michael’s point, Apple is a small player in terms of user base.”
But Apple’s business model is hardware and they’re fourth (although a distant fourth. They’re bigger than Acer and Asus. If you break out computers over $1000, Apple’s share would be larger. We’re talking about higher end GPUs here aren’t we. And it’s not about Nvidia (in that case Apple is just over 7%) but we’re talking about Premiere Pro & Resolve (I won’t even include FCPX in this). On Macs, Resolve performs much better than Premiere Pro using the same AMD GPUs, keeping this to the two cross-platform NLEs commonly used on Mac.
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No matter how you slice it Craig, the problem is minor to both Nvidia and Apple. But mostly minor to Nvidia given the tiny hardware and OS share that Apple has compared to all hardware & OS. And we all have options to get around the problem. Sure it’s annoying to our tiny sector of the computer market. I don’t expect either company to blink.
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[Andrew Kimery] “RED partnered with Nvidia to create an off-the-shelf replacement to their REDRocket cards “
Speaking of RED, did anyone notice the RED section has been removed from the forum?
Or maybe renamed? -
Although, for me, the issue is not Nvidia or Apple but Adobe and Resolve. Seems Resolve is better able to take advantage of AMD on macOS than Adobe. My concern is not the GPU “in the box” but the performance of the software. Apple’s decision to use AMD exclusively only seems to impact Adobe negatively so far.
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[Craig Seeman] “But Apple’s business model is hardware and they’re fourth (although a distant fourth. They’re bigger than Acer and Asus. If you break out computers over $1000, Apple’s share would be larger. We’re talking about higher end GPUs here aren’t we. “
Since Apple is the only hardware maker that lacks support for Nvidia GPUs it doesn’t matter that they are a distant fourth overall, it matters that the other 93% of the personal computer market supports Nvidia GPUs.
Nvidia makes a wide range of GPUs so we talking about everything from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.
[Craig Seeman] “On Macs, Resolve performs much better than Premiere Pro using the same AMD GPUs, keeping this to the two cross-platform NLEs commonly used on Mac.”
Just because Resolve has a faster render doesn’t mean Adobe hasn’t been improving theirs. If Adobe was being intransigent then they wouldn’t have 1.) increased the GPUs that can be used for hardware acceleration beyond just Nvidia, 2.) improved their OpenCL performance, and 3.) added support Apple’s proprietary API Metal.
Why is Resolve faster at rendering? I don’t know, but Adobe can both be improving (thus not intransigent) *and* still slower than Resolve at rendering. They aren’t mutually exclusive positions.
[Craig Seeman] “Apple’s decision to use AMD exclusively only seems to impact Adobe negatively so far.”
Apple’s decision impacts anyone that wants to use Nvidia GPUs on a Mac. They could be gamers, 3D modelers, Premiere users, RED users, game developers, computer scientists involved with AI/deep learning, etc.,.
Below is a link to a list to some Mac software that uses CUDA:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/gpu-accelerated-applications/catalog/?product_category_id=&search=macIf Apple wanted to ship computers w/only AMD GPUs I could understand that from a supply chain and/or business partnership relationship, but to not support Nvidia’s drivers in Mojave (thus cutting out the eGPU and cMP crowd) is just belligerent. It hurts Apple as a platform, hurts Apple’s users, and underscores the general fear that Apple is an unreliable partner that will brick your workflow at a moments notice for no good reason.
I’ve accepted that Steve Jobs’ dream of computers being a sealed, appliance-like, user-inaccessible device grows closer everyday (much to Woz’s horror), and that whenever the next MP drops it will likely be as un-upgradeable as an iMac or Mac Mini. But to arbitrarily block what peripherals I can use with it based on brand (i.e. an Nvidia GPU) just can’t be justified. What’s next? They block all eGPUs from working except for the overpriced offerings from their business partner Blackmagic?
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So we should see a mass exodus of CUDA dependent software from the Mac platform since they are such an insignificant player? After all, why bother developing for such an OS. Or perhaps macOS is important enough that they’ll improve support for AMD as you say Adobe is doing.
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[Craig Seeman]”So we should see a mass exodus of CUDA dependent software from the Mac platform since they are such an insignificant player?”
Surprisingly software developers seem able to work around Apple’s imposed limitations. That is why this is really a debate about the hardware/driver support and Apple’s attitude. Even as a niche, Apple’s hardware and OS base is obviously worth developing for. For how long, who knows.
I left Apple years ago. The exodus is slow but all I see stopping greater bleed is fear of Win OS, usually from people who haven’t dealt with it ever or not since XP.
EDIT: Most software is not CUDA dependent, but may work better with it.
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