Nvidia releases beta Mac graphics drivers for Pascal-based video cards
Less than a week after promising them, Nvidia on Tuesday released beta Mac drivers compatible with any of the company's Pascal-based cards, including the 10 series and the recently-launched Titan Xp.
The software (direct link) is useful to a relatively small segment of the Mac user base, namely people with an external Thunderbolt graphics enclosure or a pre-2013 Mac Pro with a free PCI-e slot. Nvidia's 10-series cards range from the GTX 1050 through to the GTX 1080 Ti.
The Titan Xp is a $1,200 card with 12 gigabytes of GDDR5X VRAM, and 3,840 CUDA cores clocked at 1.6 gigahertz. This translates into 12 teraflops of performance, above even the 11.3 teraflops on the 1080 Ti.
Nvidia's cards are typically aimed at Windows gamers and professionals, but the new drivers should allow users to boost Mac's limited 3D games library, and more likely graphics-intensive productivity apps.
The company could conceivably be laying groundwork for Apple's modular Mac Pros coming in 2018. It might also simply be catering to growing interest in eGPUs, which take advantage of the ports on Apple's latest Macs and make them more competitive, power-wise, with high-end PCs.
With the exception of the Mac Pro, all Macs -- even 27-inch iMacs -- rely on either mobile graphics processors or integrated Intel graphics.
The software (direct link) is useful to a relatively small segment of the Mac user base, namely people with an external Thunderbolt graphics enclosure or a pre-2013 Mac Pro with a free PCI-e slot. Nvidia's 10-series cards range from the GTX 1050 through to the GTX 1080 Ti.
The Titan Xp is a $1,200 card with 12 gigabytes of GDDR5X VRAM, and 3,840 CUDA cores clocked at 1.6 gigahertz. This translates into 12 teraflops of performance, above even the 11.3 teraflops on the 1080 Ti.
Nvidia's cards are typically aimed at Windows gamers and professionals, but the new drivers should allow users to boost Mac's limited 3D games library, and more likely graphics-intensive productivity apps.
The company could conceivably be laying groundwork for Apple's modular Mac Pros coming in 2018. It might also simply be catering to growing interest in eGPUs, which take advantage of the ports on Apple's latest Macs and make them more competitive, power-wise, with high-end PCs.
With the exception of the Mac Pro, all Macs -- even 27-inch iMacs -- rely on either mobile graphics processors or integrated Intel graphics.
Comments
Please Apple give us a Mac that can use these.
https://bizon-tech.com
Pricey but doesn't require hacker skills like most others.
I used to use a magma chassis way back in the day via the express card on my MBP. It also supported drives and allowed you to add a second card for ports of your choice. That chassis was my best friend and travel buddy on many gigs.
http://barefeats.com/nmp2013node.html
http://barefeats.com/rmbp2016node.html
The change to TB3 didn't affect the results much. The D700s in the Mac Pro still hold up pretty well vs the external when the software supports them - it's 7TFLOPs for the 3+ year old dual GPUs vs 11TFLOPs for the Titan X but AMD handles compute tasks better at times. For CUDA software, NVidia is the only option so this setup at least allows it to work.
It doesn't say if it's the Pascal Titan X there or an older model. There are comparisons for native GPUs on the Luxmark site:
http://www.luxmark.info/top_results/LuxBall HDR/OpenCL/GPU/1?page=1
In the external box, the Titan X is 16937, The 980ti is ~19100. In the native PC tests, the 980ti gets ~21000. The older Titan X gets 17,800 and the Pascal one gets ~23000-24000. I'd guess they used the older Maxwell Titan in the box.
It doesn't look like much of a performance hit and the box is only $330:
https://www.akitio.com/expansion/node
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XKKSNTS
A Titan X is a bit expensive at ~$1200 but you'd get a 980ti ~$300, maybe 1080ti. Hooked up to a lower end Mac, $630 for high-end GPU performance is an ok deal. A Mac Pro should be capable of connecting one to each TB port maybe 6X GPUs hooked up via chaining with a display plus the internal GPUs. This would work for video apps where you could send separate frames to each GPU to render.
I don't know why Apple hasn't supported external GPUs, they could even have made their own box and it would have saved all the complaints about the Mac Pro's lack of GPU updates. You just plug a new one in the back and can upgrade it whenever you want. There's a bandwidth hit vs internal PCIe but in practical terms, it's not making a difference. If the data gets cached to the GPU's internal memory then it doesn't matter, the raw processing power is still there.