It's a myth. There has never been a gold standard. There has always been mixed tools approach at the top.
This is not true, In the 90's up until the late 90's Autodesk using SGI hardware was the gold standard. I was able to use SGI at one point, and it was the fastest computer on the market and was the only one of its kind to do high end CG. Also in the UK, Quantel, the paintbox, and Henry up until the Q lines, was the gold standard for painting on a computer.
This is 1990, what Computer did this in 1990? Not anything I had access too.
Apple mainly succeeded in the middle ground with independents.
NOW fast forward 10 years from SGI and Quantel, dominance, the market changes.. Then worked on the BETA of Final Cut, shortly after Macromedia wrote it..a teacher friend of mine had the Apple OS beta of it, and when the G4 grey and white came out we where editing close to at the time D1 quality footage. This was the broadcast standard at the time.. So 720x486 and 720x480. We where able to shoot on DVCAM Cameras and edit on final cut and export to DVCAM TAPE, with the G4 MacPro. I did Graphics in After Effects and some light CG in C4D. I am not sure what was going on on PC's, but this was considered high end.
Also I was part of the APPLE SHAKE revolution, and APPLE SHAKE was used PROFESSIONALLY. I worked on feature films on my MacPro tower, DPX scans from 35mm film, from big studios, SONY, Warner Bros, MGM.. As big as you get.. I did the digital composting, in SHAKE, on a Mac using OS X, those rendered files went back to celluloid. These are films where shown in the theaters, PRE-Blu-RAY. THIS WAS PROFESSIONAL. This was a GOLD standard. This was on OS X.
Even Pixar movies under Steve Jobs weren't made on Macs.
Pixar at the time had a Proprietary RenderMan pipeline that had nothing to do with OS X. I don't think anyone is arguing that Pixar didn't use Macs... BUT later they did. A lot of CG artists who loved OS X where able to use MAYA, when MAYA was released for OS X, pre AUTODESK.
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There is almost zero CUDA in Photoshop. Mercury Engine doesn't support it and not a couple of mostly useless filters support it.
I hear rants from people who should know better, especially someone who claims to be a top compositor should know that they would be better if using Windows regardless if the Mac supported Nvidia or not. Support is one thing. APIs are another.
Im not sure you know what your talking about, I have built pipelines for VFX studios for TV and Film and at one point OS X was the gold standard.
I setup a 40 artist NUKE room with full racked 100 node render closet, and it was on OS X, not PC. Their are a lot of reasons it was built on OS X and not PC, part of it is UNIX/LINUX ports we coded, and stuff that wasn't available for PC. And Artists preferred it to windows.
https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/
(NUKE is the GOLD STANDARD for USER based non commercial compositing, and at one point NUKE on OS X)
I think your trying to argue that if you need CUDA you need WINDOWS, I think your saying if you use OS X, you have to use whatever Crappy OpenCL/Metal cards they use, AMD.. I say thats kinda only true now that Apple is stripping down its hardware and not historically.
A GTX 1080 running OS X, using CUDA, would be an equivalent level of professionalism, to what was previously on Apple. Apple doesn't care about the high end anymore, but my argument was they did, and my work history from the first G4 running Final Cut Pro is a testament to that.
