GPU choices going forward

[pastrychef]

It has been almost half a year since Nvidia released the Pascal GPUs to the world. Unfortunately, there has been no indication that there will be any driver support for macOS from Nvidia or Apple. Even Linux got Pascal support months ago. Meanwhile, we have seen considerable progress in getting AMD Polaris GPUs to a fully functional state in Sierra.

My speculation, based on Apple's products, is that Apple is currently pretty much fully committed to AMD GPUs. I believe that the last product from Apple to feature an Nvidia GPU was the 2014 MacBook Pro. Every Mac since then that featured a discrete GPU featured AMD GPUs.

In the past, I had heavily favored Nvidia due to their performance, TDP, and reliability. Over the years, I've seen far more AMD/ATI GPUs fail (with the exception of the 8800 GT). But with Polaris, it seems AMD has finally addressed their inefficiencies and, hopefully, they will be more reliable. Therefore, for a user who is looking to purchase a graphics card for use with macOS today, I feel it might be wiser to go with AMD now.

What are your views? Is it time to switch allegiance? Will continuing to wait for Pascal drivers be the equivalent to waiting for a magical unicorn to appear?

 

[Fl0r!an]

I wouldn't give up on Nvidia yet, Maxwell drivers also took ~6 months.

I've had lots of Radeon GPUs in my life and I'd like to continue supporting them, but at the moment there are a few big drawbacks from a Hackintosh point of view:

1. Apple rarely provides support for high-end GPUs, as they don't fit into any Mac. HD 6970 was buggy as hell, R9 290X/390X is still "beta", Fiji was never officially supported and we'll see what happens with Vega. Only excuse in this decade was HD 7950/7970, which had perfect support thanks to HD 7950 Mac Edition & D700. Not sure this will happen again...
2. El Capitan introduced a nasty bug which breaks sleep/wake on systems with AMD GPUs unless iGPU is configured as primary graphics device. Doing so will remove any pre-OS display output on the Radeon GPU (BIOS splash screen, UEFI setup, Clover boot manager, ...). Sierra continues to show the same behavior,and we didn't find any cure yet.
   
3. El Capitan also introduced the "boot to black screen" bug, which will cause GCN 1.2 based GPUs to crash as soon as X4000.kext loads up. Sierra expanded this bug to GCN 1.1 GPUs and the newly added Polaris GPUs.

That's the reason why the Buyer's Guide doesn't contain any AMD GPUs at the moment. Not such a big problem yet as Maxwell can keep up very will with recent AMD cards, but Vega is around the corner...

 

[Gigamaxx]

Interesting topic, ahead of its time. Lilukext and whatevergreenkext have fixed many issues for Sierra and the AMD cards. High Sierra has Vega plug and play, with only the name needing a fix, RX xxx. Polaris cards have working audio, this is great for amd users. Nvidia Web Drivers for High Sierra, maybe another December holiday release?

 

[pastrychef]

Right now, I'm most interested in how Vega performs with High Sierra on a hack when High Sierra is officially released. So far, from the reports I've read, it looks extremely promising.

I do still have a bit of doubt regarding the long term reliability of AMD GPUs though... A friend's 3 month old MacBook Pro with AMD GPU started displaying graphics glitches already and is heading back to Apple for overheating problems.

 

[Gigamaxx]

Right now, I'm most interested in how Vega performs with High Sierra on a hack when High Sierra is officially released. So far, from the reports I've read, it looks extremely promising.

I do still have a bit of doubt regarding the long term reliability of AMD GPUs though... A friend's 3 month old MacBook Pro with AMD GPU started displaying graphics glitches already and is heading back to Apple for overheating problems.

I hear ya, my reference rx 480s have been running for over a year and stressed pretty hard but are holding up. I don't see how you can put graphics cards in notebooks without serious and noisy fans.

My neighbor just got his MacBook back from a recall for an Nvidia card, he talked customer service into honoring a three year old recall.

 

[pastrychef]

My bad fortune with AMD/ATI GPUs dates all the way back to the PowerPC era. Can't remember the model...

Here are some of my experiences:
My MacPro1.1 had a Radeon X1900 which failed.
So did the Radeon X1600 in my MacBook Pro.
The Radeon in an iBook.
Several friends had 2011 MacBook Pros with GPU issues.

Of all the Nvidia cards I've own, only the 8800 GT died. The Nvidia 9400M in an old 2008 aluminum MacBook worked perfectly even when I sold it last year.

 

[Fl0r!an]

Desktop GPUs are a lot less likely to fail as the cooling is usually way better than in notebooks. Apple also sold lots of troublesome Nvidia GPUs in their MBP's (e.g. 8600GT, 330M, GT650 in Retina MBP's). I wouldn't be too concerned about this.

 

[Gen_]

I wouldn't look at GPUs as in fault for the failures MacBook Pro's have been having. As someone who has seen an old friend get a "whatever you want" upgrade on their MacBook RMA because they fell asleep with it on their legs and it burned their skin before breaking, I would put the problems squarely in the GPU maker department. The MacBook Pro has very little cooling because of it's body being used as a heatsink, but obviously controlling the heat dissipation of a case is impossible because simple things like thick trousers/pants can significantly lower it.

Knowing that Apple are getting Intel chips binned better than others to be best in class, I would expect at least higher QC on GPU parts than the ones going into retail units for discrete GPUs, so again most Macs are bad comparison examples for reliability.

tl;dr MacBooks are the reliability issue because they run so hot. Ignore them for Hacks situations.

Citation: Apple had a 1400 post thread on their own site from people demanding a recall on 2011 MBPs due to mass overheat failures. Since been deleted but was definitely there for a few months at least.

 

[pastrychef]

I don't know if the MacBooks' designs are at fault. What I do know is that typically, AMD GPUs have higher TDP than comparable products from Nvidia. Also, the MacBook cooling systems can't be blamed for the X1900 that died in my Mac Pro.