I find this feud odd (unless Nvidia is being unreasonable--which hasn't been shown). I really feel like Apple would benefit more than Nvidia by the partnership. Because of things like CUDA, there are whole domains people can only use Win/Linux for.

> Because of things like CUDA, there are whole domains people can only use Win/Linux for.

Pretty tiny domains, though.

I'm curious what professional GPU use cases you have in mind? I'm not as familiar, but ML has a pretty good lead with Nvidia/CUDA. I work in VFX. Nvidia Quadro cards have been fairly standard for more than a decade and didn't have a lock-in like CUDA (outside of the Linux driver support). In the past couple years Redshift has been the only prominent GPU renderer and it uses CUDA.

Honestly, those are the only professional use-cases for multiple GPUs I'm aware of. CAD uses GPUs, but not multiple and I don't see AMD having any lead over Nvidia. Same with other uses like GPU acceleration in things like Photoshop or video editing--1 decently fast consumer grade GPU is enough. I don't see farms and 4+ cards per box.

There's Octane, too, which afaict is used a little more than Redshift, at least in my circles.

Adobe Media Encoder (and by extension Premiere and AE) can do multi-GPU rendering as well, which starts to matter when you have huge comps. I've worked with 2D animators who need to turn around footage really quickly and a bunch of them are on multi-GPU rigs.

What are your circles? Is it arch vis, tv cartoons, commercials, or something? I'm trying to figure out from their reel why I haven't seen much of Octane in production. Octane does appear to be CUDA only.

Adobe Media Encoder does seem to support OpenCL and CUDA, but the GPU acceleration only looks like it works with certain transforms and filters, not with encoding. So I can see it helping 2d animators, but much less so for video editors--especially with multiple GPUs.

I feel like GPU rendering has been teased for like 10+ years now. Only within the past few years am I seeing studios upgrade their render farm in earnest to accommodate GPUs.

Architecture/immersive media previz seems to be all C4D + Octane, and I've seen lots of the same in 3D motion graphics as well (although I'm less familiar with the field).

Fair, but the domains that can justify buying Apple's new $5k monitor + $999 stand, are pretty small as well.

If I'm not mistaken they mentioned Quadro cards being used in the Mac Pro by one of the early testers. If this is true, it would likely mean the return of native latest-generation nVidia drivers.

Where did they mention this?

I believe they were comparing the Mac Pro performance to the performance of a non-mac configured with recent quadro cards.