esummers

macxpress said:

Does NVIDIA even make cards/drivers that support Metal? If not then thats a major issue as Apple is going more toward their own Metal graphics engine. In fact, it's required nowadays as of Mojave. I thought I remember reading somewhere that NVIDIA doesn't support Metal at the moment. 

elijahg said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

elijahg said:

The chance of Apple using them in anything in the near future? Nil. They use the Pro Vega 48 (as an option) in the top end iMac, whilst offering the 56 and 64 in the iMac Pro, essentially the same chips but progressively more locked down. Probably an artificial limitation to differentiate the iMac Pro. I bought a 2019 27" iMac recently, and I would have much rathered a Nvidia GPU than the gimped Vega 48 I have now.

It'll also be interesting to see if these new AMD chips are anywhere near as fast as Nvidia's current chips, which are much faster and run much cooler than AMD's and have done for a number of years. Apple's ridiculous ongoing spats with the only two viable GPU manufacturers is so inane and childish, ever since about 2003 when AMD accidentally leaked details of a new PowerBook, Apple's been back and forth refusing to deal with one or the other. I also have no idea why Apple is refusing to sign Nvidia's drivers, but it's a pretty low blow, especially since Nvidia support cards going back 7 or 8 years and often release Mac versions of their PCIe cards, when AMD doesn't.

Yet again Apple's political position with another company is harming its customers.

FWIW, MacOS 10.14.5 has native Radeon VII drivers.

Interesting, maybe it'll be sooner than later then. Perhaps in the fabled Mac Pro. Still have my doubts about AMD vs Nvidia though.

MplsP said:

Interesting that AMD is using a 7nm process while Intel is struggling to get a 10nm process for its processors. 

CPUs are much much more difficult to perform a die-shrink on than GPUs. GPUs are relatively simple compared to CPUs, so optimising for die-shrink is far easier.

macronin said:

MplsP said:

Interesting that AMD is using a 7nm process while Intel is struggling to get a 10nm process for its processors. 

All the more reason for Apple to go AMD (Threadripper 3) for the new modular Mac Pro...

As for the whole Thunderbolt 3 thing, both of the new X570 AM4 motherboards listed on the ASRock website are tagged as "Thunderbolt 3" ready, and ASRock offers a TB3 AIC...

I really think Apple has been waiting on TB3 support for the AMD platform(s) & Threadripper 3 for the modular Mac Pro...

Another week & we may know...! ;^p

elijahg said:

I didn't mean to insinuate you weren't, and that is absolutely true. AMD's OpenCL support and speed as I'm sure you're aware has been very good historically, which is partly why Apple used two AMD cards in the Trashcan. Seems it was a bit misjudged though, as despite at the time it appearing that we were on the cusp of a compute boom, it turned out that GPU compute is really hard to utilise well with general purpose computing. Also of course the CUDA vs OpenGL incompatibility didn't help either.

The Radeon Pro cards were really for compute workloads, so they aren't great at more general purpose workloads as shown above, but unfortunately as AMD also seemed to misjudge the market, the Radeon Pro cards now have big chunks of the silicon dedicated to the compute processing which is bogging down the general purpose performance. Perhaps this is partly why Nvidia refuses to support OpenCL, as the hardware support slows the rest of the CPU whereas Nvidia's CUDA doesn't. Navi may resolve this, possibly at the expense of compute performance despite their claims, as obviously only real life results will show.

But yes, I don't think hardware ray tracing is a particularly good metric to compare by right now.