I'm starting to think either the 6000 series cards won't work at all (ever) or the earliest we'll see support for them is sometime during the new M1 iMac launch.
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MP All Models AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / 6900 XT for macOS?
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Rough times for a company that dodges taxes and is worth 2 trillion dollars if even it can't afford a couple GPUs in 2021.
I also doubt they test the newest GPUs in 5,1 for unsupported Big Sur with lacking the drivers...
Yes it works for me in my Mac Pro 2019 with 6900XT in Windows. At MacOS there is no acceleration and when it goes to sleep it crashes. i just keep sending crash reports in the hopes apple will recognize it. To me this was a huge investment and supporting just the 5700XT and VII is not enough. i'm an editor and i need more. A modular Mac with no support for the most important part makes no sense. And i think even Apple know that. But M1 seems to be more important for Apple right now.
Do you have the latest beta installed?
My 6800XT shipped today, expecting it to arrive tomorrow.
My 6800XT shipped today, expecting it to arrive tomorrow.
Fair call, my 7,1 is on the sidelines for my current project (M1 is handling it great without having to transcode), so I've updated it to the latest 11.3 beta in anticipation of my 6800XT.no i can't i need a stable system. i'm on 11.2.3. By the way on 11.1 i had not so big problems at sleep so they did something in MacOS but not for the good so far
Doh it’s not tax dodging. International companies keep a chunk of their money in a haven using existing laws and loopholes. They do it for stability sake and they don’t hold it all in one currency because they are always paying for operations everywhere.
I feel the pain... good point is that you can probably resale it for a good benefit right now
I just never even thought to check, I mean how could the 6800XT be bigger than the MPX cards?
I’ve reached out to the retailer to see if they can swap me into a shorter card, will see how I go. If not, eBay.
So much for the Mac Pro being built with future upgrades in mind. I am slowly starting to regret spending so much on an obviously obsolete, under-supported system – and Apple knew it when it was making it. They knew its own silicon was coming up, and they probably knew there would be no CPU upgrades from Intel. What a spectacularly expensive dead end.
Sure, but those PCIe slots exist for a reason even if Intel stops making chips.
So I think we might see one last Intel Mac Pro speed bump. It is usually one of the last machines to get major tech changes and the current model is over a year old. They might hold off until 2022 and not make updates but when they built these machines it would surprise me if they weren't testing Navi 2 in them to make sure they could handle them and why waste that work. It would also cover eGPU users. That said, this is just hypothesis based on circumstance...
Right, which is why I think the lack of GPU upgrades is unacceptable but not surprising. At a minimum they should allow folks to write drivers but I doubt that's in the cards now with Apple Silicon on the horizon.
Apple hasn’t written drivers for any new GPUs lately - but they did write this:
“Mac hardware and GPU software drivers have always been deeply integrated into the system. This design fuels the visually rich and graphical macOS experience as well as many deeper platform compute and graphics features. These include accelerating the user interface, providing support for advanced display features, rendering 3D graphics for pro software and games, processing photos and videos, driving powerful GPU compute features, and accelerating machine learning tasks. This deep integration also enables optimal battery life while providing for greater system performance and stability.
Apple develops, integrates, and supports macOS GPU drivers to ensure there are consistent GPU capabilities across all Mac products, including rich APIs like Metal, Core Animation, Core Image, and Core ML. In order to deliver the best possible customer experience, GPU drivers need to be engineered, integrated, tested, and delivered with each version of macOS. Aftermarket GPU drivers delivered by third parties are not compatible with macOS.
The GPU drivers delivered with macOS are also designed to enable a high quality, high performance experience when using an eGPU, as described in the list of recommended eGPU chassis and graphics card configurations below. Because of this deep system integration, only graphics cards that use the same GPU architecture as those built into Mac products are supported in macOS.”
It’s brilliant. One could infer “Awesome new GPU drivers are on the way - just hold on a bit longer!”
Or “FU - and stop complaining. You’re lucky to have us around, with the way we so lovingly craft our incredible Mac OS drivers for each two year old AMD graphics card” ?
Depends on how much drinking you’ve been doing about the topic. I mean thinking.
“Mac hardware and GPU software drivers have always been deeply integrated into the system. This design fuels the visually rich and graphical macOS experience as well as many deeper platform compute and graphics features. These include accelerating the user interface, providing support for advanced display features, rendering 3D graphics for pro software and games, processing photos and videos, driving powerful GPU compute features, and accelerating machine learning tasks. This deep integration also enables optimal battery life while providing for greater system performance and stability.
Apple develops, integrates, and supports macOS GPU drivers to ensure there are consistent GPU capabilities across all Mac products, including rich APIs like Metal, Core Animation, Core Image, and Core ML. In order to deliver the best possible customer experience, GPU drivers need to be engineered, integrated, tested, and delivered with each version of macOS. Aftermarket GPU drivers delivered by third parties are not compatible with macOS.
The GPU drivers delivered with macOS are also designed to enable a high quality, high performance experience when using an eGPU, as described in the list of recommended eGPU chassis and graphics card configurations below. Because of this deep system integration, only graphics cards that use the same GPU architecture as those built into Mac products are supported in macOS.”
It’s brilliant. One could infer “Awesome new GPU drivers are on the way - just hold on a bit longer!”
Or “FU - and stop complaining. You’re lucky to have us around, with the way we so lovingly craft our incredible Mac OS drivers for each two year old AMD graphics card” ?
Depends on how much drinking you’ve been doing about the topic. I mean thinking.
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That's really just marketing speak, innit? All modern OSes have deeply integrated GPU drivers and Apple only works with two outside graphics vendors anyways (AMD and Intel). All major suppliers (Nvidia et al.) have to supply drivers across the spectrum for a ton of different OS versions and for the same tasks they list: raster rendering, compute, etc. Generally speaking they are very good at what they do. I have doubts that the internal Apple drivers are quantifiably more reliable than anything AMD writes for Windows 10.
Apple was supposed to open up a GPU API of sorts to developers who had consistently complained about lack of upper level access within the OS to make GPU drivers that worked as expected. That never happened and Apple shut them out. Then the NVIDIA Web Driver "battle" happened. This could "easily" be resolved by Apple being either more transparent, or granting this access (via a developer tool or API). Clearly not going to happen anytime soon. How this will impact future AMD GPUs is really the question. Looking more and more like fingers crossed for AMD M1/MX support to continue down this path or many will be "stuck" where they are at and endlessly complaining or directing blame.
Yeah I never expected to upgrade the CPU in my 7,1, but I 100% expected to do several GPU upgrades.
Apple did have a GPU API for developers. They ended it. That's what kicked off the end of the Nvidia web drivers.
What you're suggesting is a) exactly what Apple used to do and b) what they intentionally stopped doing.
There probably _is still a GPU API_. Apple still has to co-ordinate with AMD and Intel. The difference is that Apple has chosen not to allow Nvidia to use it for the web drivers on purpose.
While they haven't added support for any new models they have definitely been making changes and fixes for existing AMD GPUs. 11.3 has had a lot of changes.
I can not speak for every software but at least on the application I use Apple driver are far more stable compared to both Nvidia and AMD driver on Windows (they maybe a 10% slower though). Of course this is just my user case and your mileage may vary.