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Why would nvidia stop drivers when throwing an nvidia card into an egpu is a quick way of turning your mac into a small ai workstation? Edit: honestly I have n

Why would nvidia stop drivers when throwing an nvidia card into an egpu is a quick way of turning your mac into a small ai workstation? Edit: honestly I have no clue why I am downvoted: I really would appreciate an answer here.

Nursie 6y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted either. AFAICT the answer is that Nvidia and Apple are not the best of friends, and Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers. This may have been at least partly because it restricts the numbers of people who try making hackintoshes out of existing machines. I think this is probably a factor in the lack of support for intel Wifi too - it keeps a lot of laptops from neing able to 'just work' as hackintoshes too
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers. People think this based on a vague statement from nVidia's PR. It doesn't make any sense to me. nVidia has continued to release (minor) updates for the High Sierra drivers, and Apple has been perfectly happy to sign those. Also, this is a technically-advanced audience that would probably have no trouble installing unsigned drivers. I really think that nVidia realized they would have had to do a major driver rewrite for Mojave (because much more rendering goes through Metal) and decided it wasn't worth the effort. The Mac drivers were clearly a very low priority for nVidia; it took the better part of a year before the company added compatibility with their new Pascal graphics cards, and even then the drivers had all sorts of bugs with applications like Little Snitch[1]. It's even possible that nVidia had some knowledge of the upcoming ARM transition, and decided to cut their losses ahead of time. 1: https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/483957225401957 https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/483957225401957
  - Nursie 6y ago
    I was under the impression that Apple has moved away from allowing unsigned drivers to be loaded?
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Depends on your definition of "allow". By default they're blocked, yes, but you can change that by booting into recovery mode, opening a Terminal window, and typing: csrutil disable && csrutil enable --without kext Now unsigned kexts will be allowed to load (while leaving the rest of System Integrity Protection intact). For most software this requirement would be a massive problem, but I'm not sure that applies to the type of person installing 3rd party graphics cards in Macs...
      - Nursie 6y ago
        While I would agree with that in general, with the rise of the eGPU it seems a little less clear cut. Oh well, it is what it is...
        Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        The nVidia Web Drivers never officially supported eGPUs anyway. In order to do it at all you had to use a hack which—surprise!—also required disabling System Integrity Protection! https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/05/nvidia-egpu-thunderbolt-macos-script-video/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/05/nvidia-egpu-thunderbolt-macos...

Nursie 6y ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted either. AFAICT the answer is that Nvidia and Apple are not the best of friends, and Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers. This may have been at least partly because it restricts the numbers of people who try making hackintoshes out of existing machines. I think this is probably a factor in the lack of support for intel Wifi too - it keeps a lot of laptops from neing able to 'just work' as hackintoshes too

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers. People think this based on a vague statement from nVidia's PR. It doesn't make any sense to me. nVidia has continued to release (minor) updates for the High Sierra drivers, and Apple has been perfectly happy to sign those. Also, this is a technically-advanced audience that would probably have no trouble installing unsigned drivers. I really think that nVidia realized they would have had to do a major driver rewrite for Mojave (because much more rendering goes through Metal) and decided it wasn't worth the effort. The Mac drivers were clearly a very low priority for nVidia; it took the better part of a year before the company added compatibility with their new Pascal graphics cards, and even then the drivers had all sorts of bugs with applications like Little Snitch[1]. It's even possible that nVidia had some knowledge of the upcoming ARM transition, and decided to cut their losses ahead of time. 1: https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/483957225401957 https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/483957225401957
- Nursie 6y ago
  I was under the impression that Apple has moved away from allowing unsigned drivers to be loaded?
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Depends on your definition of "allow". By default they're blocked, yes, but you can change that by booting into recovery mode, opening a Terminal window, and typing: csrutil disable && csrutil enable --without kext Now unsigned kexts will be allowed to load (while leaving the rest of System Integrity Protection intact). For most software this requirement would be a massive problem, but I'm not sure that applies to the type of person installing 3rd party graphics cards in Macs...
    - Nursie 6y ago
      While I would agree with that in general, with the rise of the eGPU it seems a little less clear cut. Oh well, it is what it is...
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        The nVidia Web Drivers never officially supported eGPUs anyway. In order to do it at all you had to use a hack which—surprise!—also required disabling System Integrity Protection! https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/05/nvidia-egpu-thunderbolt-macos-script-video/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/05/nvidia-egpu-thunderbolt-macos...