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Yap, the 250W cards generate a LOT of heat... The 1080 would definitely run much cooler while delivering more performance.
Lets hope we get some drivers in the near future. Still no word from nvidia though...
 
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I pretty much gave up hope on Pascal drivers after seeing the comments by the Nvidia CEO at the beginning of the month. I'm just hoping that some good AMD alternatives come along soon.
 
I've seen this email. Still find it strange that they cannot state that in the forum thread.

Which "they" and "forum thread" are you talking about? If you mean NVIDIA and any thread on this site, when has NVIDIA ever posted an official comment here? Hint: never.
 
The answer seems a bit odd as well. I'm not sure what exact "help" they need from Apple to release an updated nVidia web driver, which they have been updating themselves and releasing regularly now. I can't see how it requires permission or help from Apple simply to add their new line of cards into the web driver that they write already.

It almost comes off as political, like "you should ask Apple if you want nVidia in their products", and they don't really want to bother with it otherwise.
 
The answer seems a bit odd as well. I'm not sure what exact "help" they need from Apple to release an updated nVidia web driver, which they have been updating themselves and releasing regularly now. I can't see how it requires permission or help from Apple simply to add their new line of cards into the web driver that they write already.

It almost comes off as political, like "you should ask Apple if you want nVidia in their products", and they don't really want to bother with it otherwise.

You're assuming the help requires is technical, when it could simply be legal.

It's more than likely Nvidia have working macOS Pascal drivers in-house. As for their public release, that's another matter entirely. Nvidia could risk damaging their position with Apple and nix any possibility of future Apple products having Nvidia components if they release it without Apple's blessing. After all, the money Nvidia would get from sales of after-market Pascal GPUs for Macs is nothing in comparison to selling entire Mac lines with Nvidia GPUs in.


Skip to 3.36 for Mac Pros with links to what would have been at the time Pascal testing setups. Obviously they may well have not been running macOS on them, but they have a room full of PCs already, so that seems unlikely. Nvidia and AMD would at some point be in contention for providing GPUs for the next generation of hardware, so Nvidia would have had to test their new arch out on a Mac, and the easiest machine to do that with would be the classic-style Mac Pro. To that end, there must have been basic Pascal macOS drivers.
 
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My conclusion of the comments by the Nvidia CEO:

Obviously it was originally planned Maxwell cards being installed in some Mac's. I guess Apple and Nvidia shared development of drivers. However, and for whatever reasons, when Apple decided against Nvidia Maxwell cards the drivers were already written, and Nvidia released them nonetheless. A stroke of luck for Mac Pro, eGPU and Hackintosh users.

For Pascal cards Apple did not cooperate with Nvidia from the beginning. It's over until there will be Nvidia cards in new Macs, which is unlikely for the next years.

I have now a collection of Kepler and Pascal cards, for use with my Mac Pro, as eGPU and for my future Hackintosh (Core i7-7700K I hear you coming). No more waiting for Pascal drivers.

Get a Maxwell card and leave it be until KNOWN compatible hardware comes along.

Btw: 1080Ti is expected to be launched at CES in early January, this will possibly mean an influx of 980Ti appearing on the resale market and their price getting pushed down -- good because they are becoming increasingly hard to find at retail.

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Very interesting, thanks for the video!
 
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I think you guys are reading too much in to the Nvidia CEO's message. It seemed pretty clear that macOS drivers were not even an afterthought for him. I don't recall the Kepler or Maxwell drivers taking nearly this long to arrive.

My guess is that any upcoming Macs will be using either Intel or AMD GPUs. Moving forward, we just have to hope that the AMD drivers will work well with retail AMD cards.

Hopefully, Nvidia continues to provide web driver updates for future macOS releases for cards that already have Mac drivers. Imagine if they followed Apple's way of obsoleting/vintaging systems that are 5-7 years old. GTX 680 support could be dropped as early as Q1 2017. Personally, this concerns me enough that I would not invest money in to an Nvidia card for use with Macs anymore until we see renewed commitment to Mac users in the form of drivers for current Nvidia cards.
 
I was going by the release date.

Screen Shot 2016-12-29 at 2.46.14 AM.png

Source: GeForce 600 series - Wikipedia
 
Web drivers are mean (officially) for Mac Edition cards. Oldest one supported is 8800GT, launched in early 2008.
So if it will stay like this, 680s should have at least 5 years since today.
 
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Sucks that I have my 1070 and no macOS drivers yet
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View attachment 675805 View attachment 675806

I'm building a hack since my 2,1 is finally, finally EOL. Obviously want a 1080 in it for workflow and as I plan to game a lot in Windows... so I thought I'd ask the man himself, Jensen Huang... turns out he's a really nice guy, although the news isn't too good...
The texts message exchange looks suspect, Ijs
 
Obviously it was originally planned Maxwell cards being installed in some Mac's. I guess Apple and Nvidia shared development of drivers. However, and for whatever reasons, when Apple decided against Nvidia Maxwell cards the drivers were already written, and Nvidia released them nonetheless. A stroke of luck for Mac Pro, eGPU and Hackintosh users.

Yep.

For Pascal cards Apple did not cooperate with Nvidia from the beginning. It's over until there will be Nvidia cards in new Macs, which is unlikely for the next years.

Exactly. It's not that Nvidia needs Apple's technical help. It's that if Apple has no interest in making Macs with Pascal, it's not worth the investment from Nvidia.

Pascal drivers on the Mac just aren't happening. If you really need CUDA, it's best just to move to Windows right now or stick it out with a 980. You can stick around but you'll just be disappointed.
 
Obviously it was originally planned Maxwell cards being installed in some Mac's. I guess Apple and Nvidia shared development of drivers. However, and for whatever reasons, when Apple decided against Nvidia Maxwell cards the drivers were already written, and Nvidia released them nonetheless.

What happened is that in autumn of 2014 Nvidia activated the device IDs and initialiser for Maxwell in the drivers that are usually for Kepler. This effectively allowed the Maxwell cards to run on UDA (the backwards and forwards compatible core of all Nvidia architectures) so that Nvidia could pitch the GPUs to Apple.

By summer 2015 it was apparent that Apple didn't want Maxwell so support stayed permanently in the beta stage with no specific optimisations for that architecture. That's why we often see no or little performance improvement in OpenGL over Kepler GPUs.

In Sierra Apple included updated Kepler drivers from Nvidia but stripped out the Maxwell initialisers, primarily because nearly all cMP wouldn't have official support in Sierra anyway.
 
The texts message exchange looks suspect, Ijs

A. It was an email exchange as I don't have Jensen's number,
B. If you're that suspicious, you could always email him yourself instead of constantly moaning on this forum (and many others) about lack of support simply because...
C. You stupidly dropped significant $$$ before ACTUALLY DOING SOME RESEARCH. Either way...
D. You're entitled to your opinion. As am I.
 
What happened is that in autumn of 2014 Nvidia activated the device IDs and initialiser for Maxwell in the drivers that are usually for Kepler. This effectively allowed the Maxwell cards to run on UDA (the backwards and forwards compatible core of all Nvidia architectures) so that Nvidia could pitch the GPUs to Apple.

By summer 2015 it was apparent that Apple didn't want Maxwell so support stayed permanently in the beta stage with no specific optimisations for that architecture. That's why we often see no or little performance improvement in OpenGL over Kepler GPUs.

As usual, this is completely false. Apparently you still don't understand how CPU limited most/all OpenGL apps are on a high-end GPU these days, given Apple's inefficient implementation of OpenGL.
 
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