I just got kinda called out for saying something that was more impression from what I have read here than actual knowledge. That nVidia does have Mojave drivers, but the fruit “won’t let them” release them. Come to think of it, how can cupertino stop them? Anyone know more specifically what is happening? Even though the gap with the Radeon VII seems closer than ever, there still seems to BE a gap.
Apple cannot stop nVidia from releasing the drivers. However, Apple can keep the drivers from working. If there’s security issues with the nVidia drivers wrt Mojave or bugs in Mojave that Apple would have to change/fix for nVidia, that would do it. But if nVIdia has a working driver there is nothing to stop them from putting it out.
I suspect this (broken due to security/bugs) might actually be the case. I cannot understand for the life of me why neither Apple nor nVidia has yet to issue any official public comment on the matter.
Until Apple and/or nVIdia issues some sort of official public statement all we have is purely speculation.
(And I cannot believe the pathetic state of tech journalism these days – no one, from what I can tell, has even tried to get an answer to this question from an official source. You mean to tell me that no one thought to ask Craig Federighi this at WWDC? Really?)
I actually knew exactly what was going on, a few months ago. But I don’t have any updates since. But the underlining problem was on apple’s side. you’re not too far off with the “stuff apple would have to fix for nvidia” part though. I’ll say that much. Maybe 10.15 is answer to that, who knows. But then why keep it a secret with 10.15 now a public beta. That’s where things get silly. At this point they should either say they are or they aren’t gonna work together going forward and let people make decisions based off that.
World class hubris in Cupertino… how can you approach the market with a uber expensive machine that can ONLY run GPUs from one and only one vendor? Not to mention but the responses from the scientific community I’ve tried ti reach to is a very substantial part of the market depends in CUDA. AND WTF are the tubers supposedly giveing Mac users news and information? Anyone of them calling the fruit out for this… I guess they do NOT want to anger their donors…
I had heard that there was a bug in 10.14.0 that prevented the nVidia web driver from working. That said, it was supposedly fixed in 10.14.2. I’ve heard nothing since (and that was December 2018).
(And I can confirm something changed then just due to the nature of the errors I got when testing the High Sierra web driver on Mojave. In fact, the HS driver seemed to load in Mojave in 10.14.2 – it doesn’t do any good, but at least it loaded. This makes me suspect that the ball might be in nVidia’s court, though I have no way of knowing)
The reason it doesn’t do anything is because Mojave and later require library validation for drivers/kexts. It has to be signed off by Apple or else it won’t work properly, if at all. High Sierra has library validation as an option but didn’t require it. Mojave does. That’s why there are no new drivers. If Apple won’t sign off on them, nVidia can’t release them.
This deserves a much longer answer than I have time to give right now, but I’ll cut to the chase.
- The stricter signing requirement have been in place since the introduction of SIP (El Capitan, I believe).
- Apple has, with the most recent iterations of the OS, been trying to move functionality from kernel space to user space in the name of improved security. The bug that got fixed in 10.14.2, from my understanding, was to reverse one of these changes because it made it impossible for the kext to even load. I will note that the old High Sierra nVidia kext now loads. As an aside, this is why for Catalina they are talking about a driver model completely in user space.
- Apple will essentially rubber stamp certs for code signing for registered developers in good standing. Unless there is a technical reason, it is highly unlikely Apple is refusing to certify anything. nVidia is certainly a registered developer in good standing. If Apple were holding things up for a petty reason, nVidia would (rightfully) be squawking to the tech press if nothing else.
- As mentioned frequently before, OpenGL is gone, so nVidia has/had some serious work to do to get things to work under Mojave regardless of anything else.
A good basic reference on kext writing that covers through Mojave:
www .apriorit .com /dev-blog / 430-macos-kext-development (remove the spaces). It’s aimed at developers, but is clear enough that non-developers should be able to understand it. (kext development is not for the feint of heart, so don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing)
And as I said, this is the short answer. I apologize for some generalities here. I will note that the only nVidia comment on the public record is from before 10.14.2, and was certainly true for 10.14.0 (and I think .1). But beyond that? I don’t know.
You make it sound like nvidia has no metal support. or that metal on 10.14 is drastically different from metal in 10.13.x.
10.14.x metal basically adds a few more functions to existing metal framework (with the key one being an opencl replacement in metal). it’s not a total rewrite that’d require them to suddenly need to re-invent wheel. They already have a working metal driver. in fact they even rewrote it once for 10.13.x already since 10.12.x metal driver had a slew of issues. I can’t imagine updating existing metal driver or hell even rewriting it for a second time would hold nvidia’s experienced engineers back for a year.
There is obviously something political going on. Who’s end it’s on is anyones guess. I still suspect it’s on both ends. Probably something along lines of apple going “screw cuda, we want everyone using metal going forward” and nvidia going “you support Cuda or screw your platform”.
That’s my believe anyways. Under no circomstance though do I believe it’s an issue with nvidia lying to cover for an unfinished driver. I think they absolutely are sitting on a finished driver. the question remains, what political squable is going on (which we’ll likely never know)
With Nvidia at SIGGRAPH, has there been any news? Seems like this would be a good opportunity to talk about their capacity on all platforms, especially the new Mac Pro which has to be a topic there…
Just in case anyone is wondering, there are drivers up for the latest MacOS 10.13.6 security update, and they seem to be working just fine.
[GryphonMD]
Looks like we can stop holding our collective breaths, waiting for new drivers. It appears NVidia is officially beginning the process of removing any support at all.
From the latest CUDA release notes:
- CUDA 10.2 (Toolkit and NVIDIA driver) is the last release to support macOS for developing and running CUDA applications. Support for macOS will not be available starting with the next release of CUDA.
[GryphonMD]
The end.
I have a question related to Nvidia and Hackintoshes. I guess I was hoping one day drivers would appear and resolve this, but alas.
So I’m about to buy a spare drive for a gaming PC I built last Christmas, and I’ve wanted for a while to boot macOS on it. When buying the parts I took care to make sure that almost all of it seem to be fine to use in a Hackintosh. The exception is the GPU - I have a 1070 Ti. There are no drivers for it in Mojave or Catalina and probably never will be. Let’s say I use the machine to dual-boot - would it cause problems for that GPU to stay in the PCIe slot in macOS with no drivers if there’s also on-board graphics?
The future of hackintoshing is honestly grim. I suspect apple will use AMD 2-3 more years before they make something completely in house that just cannot be hackintoshed. at that point, you’ll have a few more years of hacks on the “last supported amd card” and that’ll be that. and for the time left they do support AMD, AMD is still consistently 1-2 YEARS behind nvidia in raw performance and even energy efficiency. High end navi is probably do soon but honestly as soon as they release it to compete with 2080 and 2080ti, nvidia will launch a 2090 or something that blows it away because 2080 is literally LAST YEARS tech to nvidia and they’ve been sitting on something new for a while, bank on it.
I’ll probably hackintosh until my 1080ti isn’t good enough and then at which point, switch to windows full time when it comes for new hardware. i only have two dev tools left I rely on in macOS but I need to start getting windows counter parts for last two. Screenflow, and BBEdit
When we use Boot Camp on one of our real Macs, video cards without drivers haven’t caused any problems for MacOS. TBH, having two different cards (or a card and onboard) has caused the WINDOWS boot to have heartburn unless one of them can be disabled in BIOS.
[GryphonMD]
I agree that it could be better, but I wouldn’t call it grim just yet. I’m using a Radeon VII on my hackintosh, and on macOS, the performance not only matches the 1080ti, but beats it a lot of the time. Especially on games using Metal.
My gripe is with macOS itself. Not only has Apple been largely ignoring the OS, resulting in increasingly buggy releases, but I get the distinct feeling that the only reason macOS exists anymore in Apple’s eyes is for iOS development.
Apple either doesn’t understand it’s own user base, or it doesn’t care.
Their marrage to AMD and MacOS’s api limitations are already becoming apparent yet again with even WoW 9.0.
WoW 9.0 adopts two technologies only nvidia gpus support (mainly because amd is 1-2 years behind nvidia almost perpectually).
9.0 uses Ray Tracing and VRS (Variable Rate Shading). these are technologies nvidia gpus already have and technologies AMD MAYBE hopes to adopt mid to late 2020. Then even if AMD adopts them, neither technology is supported by Metal yet, so we’re looking at HOPING apple cares enough to include them in 10.16 (or later). Remember too that apple almost never adds features to metal in any maintenance update. if it’s not in 10.16 you can pretty much expect these technologies not to be in 10.16.1-10.16.6 and we’d have to wait another year til 10.17.
As you say, apples focus couldn’t be any further from gaming technologies. Hardware or software. So they are perfectly happy giving us second rate gpus and poor APIs. Wait til they ditch intel cpus for arm. the number of vendors left that want to even support macOS is going to shrink rapidly… So I suppose the future may not be totally grim for hackintoshing, but it definitely is for mac gaming.
The bonus of having a hackintosh though is, at end of day, you can always drop macOS on a wim and go to windows. You aren’t ever at any loss with your purchase should doomsday come for mac gaming. can’t say the same about a real mac. Even boot camp will probably be out for good once macs go ARM.
VRS is supported on metal… On iOS!
It’ll come when either AMD ships hardware that supports it, or Apple ships their own desktop GPUs.