NVIDIA GeForce Making a Comeback to Apple?

[Captain_Tom]

You wouldn't, but capable occasional gaming is always nice.

Honestly everyone I know who has had a Macused it to game fairly often.

Not to mention that I have a Macbook that I just use with Windows 10 installed on it. Intel 6000 graphics are a BEAST for only using 15w - I am able to play BF4 multiplayer for hours on just battery. I would love an UBER Zen-APU in a future 12" Macbook.

 

[Frick]

Honestly everyone I know who has had a Macused it to game fairly often.

Not to mention that I have a Macbook that I just use with Windows 10 installed on it. Intel 6000 graphics are a BEAST for only using 15w - I am able to play BF4 multiplayer for hours on just battery. I would love an UBER Zen-APU in a future 12" Macbook.

Aye the Intel IGPs has come a long way fo sho. I wish there was a socketed i3 with the Iris Pro 580.

 

[I No]

Games is the only reason we would debate if Apple should use Nvidia. If games aren't being talked about, than AMD is CLEARLY the better choice.

AMD's hardware acceleration curb-stomps Nvidia's (OpenCL is more the standard on OSX than Cuda), and again their cards are a lot cheaper to produce and therefore sell to Apple. Also you are really making me laugh with the space heater talk. RX 460 in laptops uses like <50w of energy, and Nvidia is busy shoving 2 x 180w cards in moron laptops.

Ok and where's AMD answer to those 180W cards?... oh wait that's the RX 480 which is eating up as much power as a 1080. For a company that thrives on efficient products sticking a hot, power-hogging piece of hardware into your design isn't quite the right idea now is it?. Furthermore that 460 that will be in laptops will be so stripped and so cut down that it would make the iGPU a good idea all of a sudden. Now please tell me when's the last time when AMD managed to fit a full blown desktop piece of hardware into a laptop. I'm not saying the Radeons are garbage but you cannot really put "AMD" and "power efficiency" into the same sentence.

Edit: Again if we're talking about a couple of gaming sessions / week / month whatever. The average user would rather enjoy more battery life with no added acoustics or heat rather than 5 more frames in god-knows-what game (which by the way it will be dated mostly since things on Mac get released years after they've hit PC).

 

[cyneater]

nVidia has always played nice with Apple; With every OS update they release new drivers. Not to mention that in terms of compatibility nVidia has always made their latest releases fully compatible. Considering Apple has discontinued Pro model desktops with upgradability options, this is pretty impressive for nVidia to care. Although I am pretty sure nVidia recognizes the HUGE Hackintosh community, where because of OOB compatibility their cards reign supreme over sometimes troublesome AMD cards (even though Apple has an AMD engineer on their payroll just for drivers which are bundled in the system, and thus unable to upgrade without updating the OS or downgrade when needed).

Anyway, many popular apps use CUDA, and Metal plays nice with nVidia, so no worries in regards to lacking compatibility.

CUDA is kinda dead also .. unless you have a quadro

 

[claes]

Apple does this every couple of years. They are probably less motivated by mobile GPUs and more interested in compute performance. The last time they switched was when the 5xx series came out (non-competitive compute), no surprise they switched back with Pascal...

 

[cdawall]

When AMD's current-gen 14nm GPU uses the same amount of power as NVIDIA's last-gen 28nm GPU... yes, NVIDIA is streets ahead.

An entire gen ahead as a matter of fact...

 

[Prima.Vera]

Intel 6000 graphics are a BEAST for only using 15w - I am able to play BF4 multiplayer for hours on just battery.

You're playing in 320x240?

 

[R-T-B]

You're playing in 320x240?

Meh, Intel 6000 can do way more than that. It's actually approaching 1080p turf for many games, and can easily do 720p.

That said, it's not hot stuff by any means.