- Joined
- May 19, 2015
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- 447
- Motherboard
- Asus ROG STRIX Z270G GAMING
- CPU
- i7-7700
- Graphics
- RX 560
The good reasons for Apple to chose AMD GPUs are a lot, not being cheaper because Apple ain't cheap and they actually go only for premium products, but the most important besides gaming AMD GPUs are pure OpenCL powerful cards which is good for professional work which is what Apple needs, Nvidia for years has separated their professional cards from gaming cards, because Nvidia has Quadro GPUs for professional work where the GTX are only for gaming, thats Nvidia's strategy not Apple's.
AMD gives the whole package in their consumer GPUs as their professional cards, Apple is a wise company and their professional software takes huge advantage from OpenCL (compute power) that is in AMD cards for that professional work Apple needs.
Even in Windows side software like the Adobe 2018, Sony Vegas and DaVinci Resolve are taking that advantage from AMD GPUs compute power for professional rendering, not only Apple.
Apple ain't cheap, but they love max profit more. Just look at how they manipulate the supply chain of their various products, they want premium-ish parts at the most importantly the lowest price. They choose AMD because they aren't pushing their own API that compete with OpenCL, and probably other financial incentives. If Nvidia were to provide parts at cheaper price and abandon CUDA at the same time, Apple might just switch at a heartbeat.
Apple created OpenCL, so obviously they (along with AMD) would declare that as the best thing since sliced bread and only support that in Final Cut. On the other hand there are plenty of established apps/APIs utilizing CUDA better than OpenCL, and GPGPU libraries that simply don't even care and just support both. "Pure OpenCL powerful cards which is good for professional work" is too much of a blanket statement without context (but of course that's exactly what Apple/AMD want you to believe).
This whole thing mirrors the OpenGL vs DirectX war back in the day, with no clear answer if one was truly better than the other. It simply comes down to what apps you use.
Also there's AMD Raedon Pro with is just like the Quadro line, so I'm not really following that "AMD gives the whole package in their consumer GPUs as their professional cards" logic.
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