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3D modelers want NVIDIA cards, not Radeon, as NVIDIA supports CUDA. This has been a longstanding issue with 3D folks; the old trashcan Mac Pro had NVIDIA GPUs e
by internobody 7y ago
3D modelers want NVIDIA cards, not Radeon, as NVIDIA supports CUDA. This has been a longstanding issue with 3D folks; the old trashcan Mac Pro had NVIDIA GPUs even with otherwise-outdated internals. When rumblings came of new Mac Pros a few years ago there was excitement that they could get some fast machines again; alas this appears not to be the case.
- pat2man 7y agoIn theory you can stick any nvidia cards you want into this machine. Don't have to stick with the stock AMD GPUs.
- jakemauer 7y agoUnfortunately for reasons that remain murky Nvidia still hasn’t put drivers out for Mojave and their absence from the keynote leads me to believe they won’t have drivers for Catalina. Nvidia blames Apple saying they’re not approving drivers. So yes you can slap a 2080ti in your Mac Pro but without drivers it’s useless.
- jandrese 7y agoAnybody know what Apple's problem with nVidia is? Are they still feeling burned from the BGE failures several generations back?
- mises 7y agoThis is a professional machine. No one wants to buy it and use hacky work-arounds, they want good drivers. Which aren't an option with nvidia on macos.
- martin_bech 7y agoThe old Mac Pro has AMD FirePro GPUs. Not Nvidia
- banachtarski 7y agoMacOS does not support vendor-supplied drivers which has been the bane to every graphics engineer's existence. Supporting mac for games as a result, is a completely inane task we avoid like the plague. To me, because of the GPU, this machine is a giant paperweight.
- snazz 7y agoI’d argue this is good for users, because vendor-supplied drivers always seem to have crappy updater software running at all times and send pop-ups at all hours on Windows. Vendors really need to better support open-source drivers for user experience purposes, but they don’t because they want more control over their market.
- banachtarski 7y agoDon't conflate the updater with the driver itself. Apple could have enforced a policy around integration with the system update functionality or something, but the driver supplied by the vendor will always be better/faster because it can exploit internal knowledge about the hardware.
- snazz 7y agoYes, I get that. All I’m trying to say is that the current user experience with third-party drivers for anything (especially nVidia graphics cards) is not the kind of thing Apple would want to inflict on their users.
- pcwalton 7y agoIt's not good for users when vendor drivers work and Apple's drivers don't. I know OpenGL is deprecated, but a lot of apps still use it because it's cross platform, and Apple has the worst GL drivers in the industry. Even Metal is missing many features from Vulkan [1]. [1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/blob/master/Docs/MoltenVK_Runtime_UserGuide.md#limitations https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/blob/master/Docs/Mo...
- mcphage 7y ago> 3D modelers want NVIDIA cards, not Radeon, as NVIDIA supports CUDA What do 3D modelers use CUDA for? I know it gets used for machine learning, but I'm not familiar with what else.
- sdan 7y agoI've heard that CUDA can help decrease render times on Adobe Premiere Pro and several other programs. I'm guessing that includes 3D modeling software like Fusion 360 or something to help with various molding and simulation features.
- abakker 7y agoFWIW, I've done some pretty complex part simulations in F360, and it's not that slow, on my Vega MacBook pro 2018. But, if it is, Fusion has online-sim calculator or renderers that are pretty affordable.
- sdan 7y agoProbably has to do with other software like Maya or other simulation like programs. In fact F360 worked flawlessly on my 2016 dual-core 2.0 ghz CPU with 8gm of RAM.
- mdorazio 7y agoNot F360 that I'm aware of, but for 3D, 3DS Max, C4D, and Maya both support GPU-based rendering using CUDA, which can be a big performance boost. On the video side, Premiere Pro, Vegas, and AVID tend to have better support for CUDA as well. However, AMD support has been catching up in the last couple years.
- 8draco8 7y agotin foil hat thoughts what if CUDA on MacOS allows Adobe products to outperform Final Cut rendering times and Apple don’t want to jeopardize it’s offering?
- 7y ago
- SahAssar 7y agoDid the trashcan really support NVIDIA GPUs? Wikipedia only lists NVIDIA GPUs for 2009 and earlier, which makes it the tower models, not the trashcan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro#Specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro#Specifications
- TimTheTinker 7y agoNope, only AMD. Source: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/mac-pro-cylinder-faq/how-to-upgrade-mac-pro-cylinder-gpu-video-card.html https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/mac-pro-cylinder-...
- kllrnohj 7y agoMost major 3D modeling programs support OpenCL, as well, not just CUDA. In particularly any of them with MacOS ports are not CUDA-only (since, you know, MacOS hasn't supported CUDA-capable GPUs for many many years now), making the argument for CUDA specifically rather moot. In terms of just GPGPU performance Vega is pretty competitive against Nvidia. It's not nearly as one-sided as the gaming space is. That is, in fact, the one saving grace of the Radeon VII in the first place vs. the RTX 2080 - its stronger professional workload capabilities.