NVIDIA Deals a Blow to Apple's Pro Community by Dropping CUDA Support for macOS

[Tsing]

Apple's OS has become a lot less appealing for animators and developers who rely on NVIDIA's GPUs for work. According to the toolkit's latest release notes, NVIDIA is dropping macOS support from its parallel computing platform and application programming interface model, CUDA. Users who own an NVIDIA GPU and wish to use it for general-purpose processing may have to switch to Windows.

Currently, NVIDIA is the only company making GPU hardware capable of hardware-accelerated ray tracing, a welcome tool used by animators and developers. Presumably, those people were already leaning on Windows—given Apple’s lack of official CUDA support. Yet this now makes it very clear to them that they’re not really welcome on Apple’s operating system.

 

[Brian_B]

Unfortunate but not entirely unexpected. Doesn't affect too many people still, as there haven't been a lot of machines with the ability to drop in an nVidia card easily (at least without a TB3 external adapter).

 

[Eduardo_Domingot]

This will back fire on Nvidia so badly.
This isnt AMD they are trying to boss around.

 

[Brian_B]

This will back fire on Nvidia so badly.
This isnt AMD they are trying to boss around.

I don’t know. Apple hasn’t had anything to do with nVidia for years. Apple isn’t in nVidia’s largest marketplace (gaming). Where Apple does dominate they tend to pull development in house (mobile). I think Apple
enjoys having the ability with AMD (and Intel
honestly) to do semi-custom designs that fit their form factors - not sure this is something nVidia has really entertained much since the original XB (apart from their SoC lineup, which Apple could care less about)

The only marketplace nV is really missing out on are content creators that use Apple. It’s a market, and one Apple has lived in for decades now, but it isn’t a huge market.

Interestingly enough - Apple has enough cash on hand to just outright purchase nV if they wanted to pursue that, but I don’t think they would - not enough synergy.

I just don’t see a scenario where it really backfires on nVidia. They dont really have much to lose in not dealing with Apple.