Hi Guys,
Having watched the official WWDC stream and a few "Hands Off" overview videos I think it's pretty clear that Apple have drawn a line in the sand with regards to Nvidia.
There was absolutely no mention of Nvidia support in any of streams/videos .. and i'm guessing that was deliberate.
One of the biggest industry pushes for Apple to support Nvidia in Mojave was from RED for 8K video editing using RTX 2080 TI, i'm guessing that a fully decked out 2019 Mac Pro with the Afterburner card would blow RTX 2080 out of the water when it comes to 8K video editing, so Apple have now satisfied RED's demands without giving into Nvidia.
Apple do seem to have checked all the boxes for Pro's with the announcement of the new Mac Pro, but it really is a system for top tier professionals as I think its fair to say that even a medium decked out Mac Pro is going to cost in the $25,000.00 - $30,000.00 range (28 Core CPU, 1 x Vega II Duo GPU, 512GB EEC Memory and decent sized storage)
The
Verge is estimating that a fully loaded 2019 Mac Pro with 2 x Duo GPU's, Afterburner card and XDR Displays will cost more than $50,000.00 !!!
But then if you can afford RED 8K cameras then i suppose you'll be able to afford it ...
Info on the Vega II GPU's is now available on AMD's site :-
Seems to be based on the same architecture as used on the Radeon VII (64 CU's / 7nm) but with 32GB HBM Memory and of course will include a highly optimised Apple Tax pre-processor
Will be very interesting to see the real word compute performance and benchmarks once these things hit the market, and if Nvidia will support Apples new MPX GPU architecture.
Cheers
Jay