[SOLVED] Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080/1070

[nineniner]

Except that it isn't the exact same 900 users who can upgrade.

Of those Mac users who have 'real' Macs with Nvidia 9xx cards, they are all of course old cheesegrater tower style Mac Pro users with PCI-E expansion (I'm ignoring external GPU users - there's clearly very, very few people doing this. Maybe this will change now TB3 is spreading...). Sierra cuts off support for a lot of these models as per Apple's policy of only supporting hardware up to ~5 years old in OS releases. Now only mid 2010 or later Mac Pro models are officially supported in Sierra. El Capitan supported many more Mac Pro models that were capable of accepting aftermarket graphics cards.

This means the only 'legitimate' customers for an aftermarket Nvidia part are 2010 and 2012 Mac Pro model owners - the total addressable market for the driver is now really small. The cost of engineers plus QA in Santa Clara's insanely expensive labor market for building a driver will easily exceed several hundred thousand dollars - I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we never see it, there's so little money to be made.

this makes no sense. Why would they dismiss the hackintosh market just because it is unofficial? It still makes money, and so counts. Are they not a business?

 

[izo1]

Just an update -- got the 980Ti SLI working and it has unbelievable performance with Octane renderer.

The only issue is, since I'm on an mATX board, the cards are super tight in terms of being close together and the bottom card reaches 84c during gaming (which I hear is fine as long as it's under 90c).

Of course these cards run hotter as they are 250watts each compared to lower TDP of Pascal. And that means they are a bit louder, but I was able to set the curve on it and it's pretty quiet.

Also when utilizing CUDA, the GPU fans don't even kick up -- so I'm pretty much in heaven.
ALL adobe apps, including Premiere, After Effects (Fast Draft mode with CUDA) are FANTASTIC with CUDA.
I can throw around Red 6k/8k footage without a problem. I'm not 100% sure if Adobe utilizes both GPUs, but Octane uses both for sure.

The ONLY downside is I had to get rid of the Wifi/BT card and lose Handoff
I tried to run a PCIe extension cable on the blocked PCIe4x card so I can mount the mini-PCIe card to the backside of the case, but no go.

So all in all, pretty happy. 1080 is going up for sale next week

P.S. you guys are going to hate me for being a deserter...
But It's Apple's fault to be honest. They really have dropped the ball for hating on CUDA and it's capabilities. I honestly believe Apple NEEDS to use nVidia GPUs in the Mac Pros and iMacs. They can use AMD in the MacBook Pros for all I care, but for REAL work, nVidia is king and CUDA is still king in terms of computational performance.

This is coming from a guy who works professionally in post production on some really famous/big projects (for obvious reason I can't talk about any of it)....but take my word for it. CUDA is king. If this computer can last me for a few years, I'll be a happy lad. It's mostly for work and some leisure under windows (VR+brainless gaming).

 

[izo1]

this makes no sense. Why would they dismiss the hackintosh market just because it is unofficial? It still makes money, and so counts. Are they not a business?

Because Apple doesn't support it and condones it, nVidia can't "support" it.

Once the 5,1 Mac Pro is unsupported, it will get worse for nVidia.

The ONLY thing I see that will be "officially supported" will be the eGPU market -- because eGPU is an official part of Thunderbolt 3.

 

[Gymnae]

eGPU is our best bet, hopefully 2017 it will take off. Looking at "thewolfe" and it's support for Maxwell, it might take the better part of 2017 for eGPU casings to become relevant enough. They are the best option for pro users and hopefully Mac owners in the need for speed will make their voice heard. Nvidia must be interested in not leaving the field to AMD alone. If they can trigger enthusiasts to opt for exetrnal Nvidia GPUs, this may make Apple reconsider their pro offerings

 

[onmybikedrunk]

I don't even think eGPU will save us here. I think the only saving grace is going to be new Nvidia chips in a new Mac Pro. And I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon. Maybe in a few years... My hope is that the job posting from Nvidia to work with their Apple development team might actually mean something.

If I don't see a driver update next week with 10.12.2 - I'm out. 980Ti's till next-gen AMD cards. I'm over it. I think "giobox" hit the nail on the head (unfortunately)...

EDIT: Maybe on Tuesday during AMD's Zen event we'll see a new GPU that can stack up against the 1080 ... But wait the 1080 Ti is gonna be released Q1 of 2017 right? Shoot.

 

[littlegreen]

I have been religiously reading this thread for a long time now. I even posted a few times but something has been bothering me for the last few days so here goes:

NVidia did post job offerings for Apple-related work a while ago. That sounds great - but is it really? We have GTX 20x0 cards coming out in the summer of 2017 - so there might be something there? I sure hope so - they are still going to be Pascal based chips, so 10x0 cards might get snuck along. Who knows, right? It might just as well be phony information all together.

Else, that team that has allegedly been put together by NVidia could just as easy be working on the Volta generation coming (probably) in 2018. If you think about it it actually makes sense. Volta is not 100% ruled out to be put in new macs (why not Pro's?) and Apple has a history of wanting things to be perfect ON LAUNCH and not after (though the new MacBook Pro is quite the exception) - so maybe NVidia is working on a project that has to do with Volta GPUs that are still in the pipeline.

Or, as I said - it might be that these "job offerings" are nothing more than a tease someone threw at the internet and watched it burn.
That is just an overview from my perspective on what has been going on around NVidia correlating to Apple.

My personal opinion is that Apple are dropping the ball. Badly. The Mac Pro is about to get 4 years old. I think that says more than enough about what road Apple has chosen. We need to wake up! They clearly do not think the Pro market is one worth pursuing and so they are not.

And it only makes sense - think about it! If you had a Skylake or Kaby Lake Desktop class CPU with interchangeable GPUs why on earth would you buy a laptop to do the work for you?

What you have instead is a laptop with EVERYTHING - yes - EVERYTHING soldiered on. You can't change the CPU, can't change the GPU, can't change the RAM. You can not even swap your SSD. You now can not even take the WiFi card out and swap it for another one. Why would they give us a desktop that can swap desktop-class GPUs?!?!

Moving forward I imagine they will get their own eGPU solution that will cost $1500 or more on the market to solve the issue with awful MacBook graphics and make a little more money on the side.

Or better yet - they could sell "NVidia GTX 10x0 External GPU for Mac" - think about it. A card that costs $399 can easily be sold for $2399! It makes so much more sense that way - you just give us a whole bunch of money so you can just plug it in and that's it!

Same goes for AMD - "AMD RX 580 External GPU for Mac" - $1999. Plug it in and you're good! There. Solved.

 

[matpic]

everyone expecting Apple to do something for the drivers is definitely wrong. they won't do anything. our only hope is Nvidia that could create the drivers for those that use external gpus with osx.

 

[thedocbwarren]

With so many deals with AMD right now (for various reasons) it's likely Nvidia will get some competition. Whether the markets are interesting to them is another story. I see two big moves that I believe are shaking things up for them: Intel partnering with AMD for iGPU, Google pushing machine learning with AMD. Less interesting, but still a thing, was the multiple deals with AMD for PS4 and XBOX. That was more related to the SOC concept that Nvidia and Intel can't fulfill.

There is a lot of anger and distrust with Nvidia due to the way they handle business with gaming partners, also their lack of open-source cooperation with the linux community. And lastly the pricing (due to their dominance.) You can be smug for so long and it catches up. This might be their time. We shall see.

I (personally) believe the Apple side is done with Nvidia. I jumped on the 1080 for the machine learning side and compute performance compared to what is available now on AMD. Mac Pros don't cut it for this (I own a beastly one and know from experience.)

So depending on your workload I'd only consider Nvidia if you need it for high-end work that you can use in Linux. Gaming is another thing, otherwise go with a supported AMD card in macOS.

 

[giobox]

this makes no sense. Why would they dismiss the hackintosh market just because it is unofficial? It still makes money, and so counts. Are they not a business?

Does it make money though? None of us can say for sure. If I had to bet, I'd be putting money on Hackintosh GPU sales being so small it can't possibly make back the investment in engineering and QA resources a driver needs. Even with a small team, this will easily run to hundreds of thousands of dollars (check glassdoor salaries for good software/QA engs in the Bay Area if you aren't familiar - not a cheap resource). More, if it did make back the investment, maybe we would have actually got the driver already.

As I said, now that Sierra supports so few real Macs that have a slot for a GPU upgrade, that market is even smaller. Unless external GPUs really take off, I don't think the incentive is there. I really want this driver too, but you need to look from perspective of product management at Nvidia. In that position I wouldn't want the support burden of a driver that earns little or no money when those engineers could be better used elsewhere in the business.

Our only real hope is that Nvidia get a design win on an iMac/Mac Pro model and therefore Nvidia have a financial incentive to work on a driver, or the TB3 eGPU market starts showing some signs of life.

 

[XQC]

Does it make money though? None of us can say for sure. If I had to bet, I'd be putting money on Hackintosh GPU sales being so small it can't possibly make back the investment in engineering and QA resources a driver needs.

True. On the other hand, there are Pascal drivers even for FreeBSD and Solaris... like, come on Nvidia.