Intel’s top Arc A770 GPU is priced at $329, available October 12th

hishnash · October 3, 2022

On 9/30/2022 at 5:12 AM, yolosnail said:

Wonder if they'll do Mac drivers, I can whack one in my 2009 Mac Pro and really stick one to Apple!

Nope will not happen, (not for macOS) both intel and Apple have no reason to put in the considerable dev time that would be needed to support them on macOS. The reason macOS (x86) still gets updates to support AMD cards is AMDs driver teams just opt to included them in the bundle, AMD are well known for working realy well with patterns going so fare as to send skilled teams to work from partners offices directly embedded within the partner so as to provide support but this also means these AMD driver devs are a lot of freedom (like other apple devs)

StDragon · October 3, 2022

12 hours ago, hishnash said:

Nope will not happen, (not for macOS) both intel and Apple have no reason to put in the considerable dev time that would be needed to support them on macOS. The reason macOS (x86) still gets updates to support AMD cards is AMDs driver teams just opt to included them in the bundle, AMD are well known for working realy well with patterns going so fare as to send skilled teams to work from partners offices directly embedded within the partner so as to provide support but this also means these AMD driver devs are a lot of freedom (like other apple devs)

Also Apple owns their own stack in the form of their SOC (M and A series). For them, the future is ARM with their Metal API.

Gaming on Apple is essentially gaming on Console.

hishnash · October 4, 2022

10 hours ago, StDragon said:

Also Apple owns their own stack in the form of their SOC (M and A series). For them, the future is ARM with their Metal API.

Intel and AMD have metal 3 drivers for thier gpus on apple stack, looking at ARC I expect it would not have any major issues supporting the same sub-set of metal3 that AMD can support (there are some metal features that are very much focused on TBDR gpus and thus not supported on AMD or intel GPUs).

Apple have not published any ARM64 drivers for AMD gpus, I expect the main hurdle on this is not the gpu driver side but rather getting the display manager stuff working. If it were easy I think the AMD team would have pushed support but the new display manager on M1/2 is much closer to that apple uses on A* chips this brings a load of advantages when it comes to changing resolution, adding/removed displays etc without needing to drop a single frame but is likely also written explicitly assuming apples display controller (that does a load of the final compositing). So if we see and AMD/intel drivers for these platforms they will be limited to compute and maybe display out but not for system UI just target out from applications that support it so that they do not need to attempt to support those features.