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To be fair, one less desire-able 'solution' to drivers issues would be to not allow the hardware to work at all. MacOS users don't have access to Nvidia graphic

To be fair, one less desire-able 'solution' to drivers issues would be to not allow the hardware to work at all. MacOS users don't have access to Nvidia graphics cards, for example. I'll take Windows' driver work over that any day.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
MacOS includes drivers for (most) 700-series graphics cards. It's just, Apple hasn't shipped Macs with nVidia cards since 2013ish, so they don't ship Mac OS with drivers for cards they never used, either. nVidia used to ship third party Mac drivers for their newer cards, but they decided to stop maintaining them a couple years ago, possibly because Apple said they wouldn't sign them them†, depending on how you interpret vague PR statements. Still, the third party drivers work on slightly older OS's—I'm currently typing this from a macOS High Sierra machine that has a GTX 1080 Ti. † I want to note that driver signing isn't some draconian Apple thing, 64 bit versions of Windows also require signatures. You can install unsigned drivers on macOS by partially disabling SIP, but presumably nVidia didn't want to ship drivers that would require that.
- gdxhyrd 7y ago
  Even for supported cards, Apple's drivers are broken. OpenGL support is a decade old and deprecated. No Vulkan support whatsoever. No Direct3D either. No CUDA even if you own an NVIDIA card. The only thing that works is Metal, on purpose.
- maximilianburke 7y ago
  It’s not the driver signing that’s the problem. It’s that Apple is a gatekeeper for driver signatures and won’t release drivers unless it suits them. I know the GTX 1080 works on High Sierra, but that OS is at (or near) the end of its supported life. Microsoft manages the driver signing process but doesn’t play these games. If nVidia wants to write and maintain drivers for macOS, why get in their way?
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I guess it just depends on what's actually happening. What nVidia has said is: > Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14. A lot of people have decided to interpret this as "Apple is refusing to sign nVidia drivers", but I'm not ready to jump to that conclusion without more explicit details. For example, nVidia has continued to release drivers compatible with High Sierra security updates (necessary because nVidia driver coded their drivers such that they'll refuse to launch on non-whitelisted build numbers). Apple has not suddenly refused to sign those drivers. My personal theory: in Mojave, all desktop compositing goes through Metal, so nVidia would have needed to a major rewrite of their drivers. Given how few Mac users install third party graphics cards, this isn't worthwhile for nVidia. nVidia wants Apple to implement some type of legacy shim in macOS that drivers can plug into, and Apple characteristically said no. That, to me, makes more sense than Apple suddenly deciding not to sign any drivers which are compatible with 10.14+.
    - unicornfinder 7y ago
      People also seem to be interpreting the line "eager to help Apple deliver great drivers" as Nvidia having new drivers ready to go, which I strongly suspect isn't the case.
    - gdxhyrd 7y ago
      Doubtful. Apple hasn't provided proper drivers for years, way before 10.14. And regardless of GPU brand. Not only that, the cost of implementing a Metal frontend is trivial for NVIDIA.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

MacOS includes drivers for (most) 700-series graphics cards. It's just, Apple hasn't shipped Macs with nVidia cards since 2013ish, so they don't ship Mac OS with drivers for cards they never used, either. nVidia used to ship third party Mac drivers for their newer cards, but they decided to stop maintaining them a couple years ago, possibly because Apple said they wouldn't sign them them†, depending on how you interpret vague PR statements. Still, the third party drivers work on slightly older OS's—I'm currently typing this from a macOS High Sierra machine that has a GTX 1080 Ti. † I want to note that driver signing isn't some draconian Apple thing, 64 bit versions of Windows also require signatures. You can install unsigned drivers on macOS by partially disabling SIP, but presumably nVidia didn't want to ship drivers that would require that.

gdxhyrd 7y ago
Even for supported cards, Apple's drivers are broken. OpenGL support is a decade old and deprecated. No Vulkan support whatsoever. No Direct3D either. No CUDA even if you own an NVIDIA card. The only thing that works is Metal, on purpose.
maximilianburke 7y ago
It’s not the driver signing that’s the problem. It’s that Apple is a gatekeeper for driver signatures and won’t release drivers unless it suits them. I know the GTX 1080 works on High Sierra, but that OS is at (or near) the end of its supported life. Microsoft manages the driver signing process but doesn’t play these games. If nVidia wants to write and maintain drivers for macOS, why get in their way?
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I guess it just depends on what's actually happening. What nVidia has said is: > Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14. A lot of people have decided to interpret this as "Apple is refusing to sign nVidia drivers", but I'm not ready to jump to that conclusion without more explicit details. For example, nVidia has continued to release drivers compatible with High Sierra security updates (necessary because nVidia driver coded their drivers such that they'll refuse to launch on non-whitelisted build numbers). Apple has not suddenly refused to sign those drivers. My personal theory: in Mojave, all desktop compositing goes through Metal, so nVidia would have needed to a major rewrite of their drivers. Given how few Mac users install third party graphics cards, this isn't worthwhile for nVidia. nVidia wants Apple to implement some type of legacy shim in macOS that drivers can plug into, and Apple characteristically said no. That, to me, makes more sense than Apple suddenly deciding not to sign any drivers which are compatible with 10.14+.
  - unicornfinder 7y ago
    People also seem to be interpreting the line "eager to help Apple deliver great drivers" as Nvidia having new drivers ready to go, which I strongly suspect isn't the case.
  - gdxhyrd 7y ago
    Doubtful. Apple hasn't provided proper drivers for years, way before 10.14. And regardless of GPU brand. Not only that, the cost of implementing a Metal frontend is trivial for NVIDIA.