Apple ditches NVIDIA, goes with ATI for their desktop lineup

http://tech.icrontic.com/news/apple-switches-to-ati-exclusively-for-imac/

by primesuspect • 16 years ago

38 42 16 years ago

tech.icrontic.com

jlcgull• 16 years ago

A sad day indeed, at least for me. I inevitably end up running some flavor of linux on almost all my computers sooner or later. ATI's support for linux, compared to nVidia, has been piss-poor to say the least (certainly in my experience). I have always recommended and bought nVidia cards for this one reason. In fact, we recently went with nVidia's QuadroFX 4800 cards for 5 new workstations (requiring stereo vision on linux/macOS). Want to guess the biggest factor why no one on the team even dared think ATI ? ... The (almost always) nightmarish experiences with ATI's low-end 'consumer cards' on their personal linux machines led to a lack of faith in any ATI product.

Please note, as far as linux support goes, I am talking about the "official ATI closed source drivers".

mdwrigh22• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, this is exactly what I came in here to say. This truly is a sad day for anyone that wants to use anything but OSX on their Mac.

(Written on a Macbook Pro running Ubuntu 10.04)

dman5• 16 years ago

As I said above the reality of current Ati drivers is much better than the fiasco that existed four years ago. On ubuntu it just works.

joubert• 16 years ago

If the article is to be believed, the switch to ati only applies to iMacs, not MacBooks...

tsuraan• 16 years ago

The open ATI drivers really are improving. From my own experience, my home desktop with an nVidia 8800GTS can run for about a week before the display starts getting crazy amounts of corruption, and KDE grinds to a halt. My work machine, with an AMD HD4650 card, runs smoothly and never has any issues. Support for KMS is also a plus. I don't really do much 3D stuff on either machine though, so I haven't been noticing nVidia's generally superior OpenGL support for a while. Both machines have dual 1900x1080 monitors, and the home machine is a lot beefier than the work one.

dman5• 16 years ago

I think youre in for a surprise if you try the new drivers! On ubuntu the install is seamless, even otherwise the installer just works and ati has pretty simple interface for doing colour balancing of multiple displays.

maigret• 16 years ago

Let me disagree with that. The open drivers don't support 3D, and the closed drivers make X crash at least once a day on my setup and similar ones. I have a laptop that is just one year old. All in all, I always got a better Linux experience with NVidia.

davidw2• 16 years ago

nVidia has closed source drivers too, no? I think your best bet is the Intel stuff. If I recall correctly, they produce actual open source drivers that end up integrated where they need to be, rather than as some binary blob you have to download.

Of course, I don't think the Intel ones are high end, but all I need is browsing and emacs, really.

pmjordan2• 16 years ago

There have been problems with the latest intel chips on Linux, and even on well supported chips I've had trouble with weird resolutions, multi-monitor, etc. I'm currently using an AMD 785G chipset based motherboard which comes with a Radeon 4200 - the open source drivers for this actually work, including enough 3D support for desktop compositing. It's more stable than the proprietary driver for my old GeForce 8800. (no crashes or corruption so far)

That said, Radeon 5xxx series support is in its infancy.

w1ntermute2• 16 years ago

If you have only tried the closed source ATI drivers (fglrx), you might find it well worth your time to give the open source xf86-video-ati drivers a shot: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/

As long as you don't need 3D acceleration, they are the best choice. In distributions like Ubuntu, they are built into the default install, so your display will be working perfectly even on the live CD. Also, their multi-monitor support is fantastic.

Zev• 16 years ago

As long as you don't need 3D acceleration, they are the best choice.

That is a pretty big thing to be missing.

dman5• 16 years ago

Sorry to rain on your parade - but for recent cards I thought http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-radeonhd/ was the preferred driver ?

veeti• 16 years ago

I think that ATi is going in the right direction with their Linux drivers: the newest version has support for 2.6.34 and Xorg 1.8 out of the box, whereas with past versions hacks were necessary.

bryanlarsen• 16 years ago

As a counter-example, I have always had much better luck with fglrx than with the closed nVidia drivers.

rtrunck• 16 years ago

I'm not totally sure Apple has ditched NVIDIA for long - there are reports of Fermi based graphics cards working. Apparently the GTX460, GTX470 and GTX480 all work.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/07/03/imac.and.mac.p...

I have also heard other reports of users verifying they work, for both real Macs and hackintoshes.

keyle• 16 years ago

I'm not sure Apple actually stops using NVIDIA at all, but that's great news. Great news for Hackintosh'es.

pxlpshr• 16 years ago

Well, I didn't have a good experience with NVIDIA even though it's been a great brand to me when I used a PC many years ago. The NVIDIA 8800 in my Mac Pro was a miserable failure, and neither NVIDIA or Apple would RMA it even though I had on record multiple complaints about spotty behavior before it completely failed.

I read lots of complaints on the Apple forums, and not just about this particular card.

Groxx• 16 years ago

We'll get more OpenCL & OpenGL focus on ATI cards now :)

dedward• 16 years ago

Does anything actually use OpenCL yet?

37prime• 16 years ago

"ditching" is a strong word. Apple has always been rotating between GPU vendor.

Raphael_Amiard2• 16 years ago

" Apple has been going in the direction of ATI’s OpenCL acceleration architecture, the competitor to NVIDIA’s CUDA."

OpenCL is not ATI's technology. When i spot such an inacurracy in an article, i stop reading it, since i have suddenly no more reason to believe that the rest of it isn't just as inacurate

hakunin3• 16 years ago

That seems completely illogical since you cannot and will not verify most of information, and since information does not come in any kinds of packets or chunks of truthfulness. Why does an incorrect statement invalidate the whole article? When you find that your dog has a flaw, you don't throw away the whole dog now, do you?

parallax7d• 16 years ago

When it comes to news sources, it's best to 'throw out the whole dog' when they can't get the very basis of their usefulness correct - reporting facts.

gintas2• 16 years ago

Pieces of information from the same source are not independent with regard to reliability. To establish reliability of the source, one should take a sample of facts and verify. If you can find misinformation even without investigation, it indicates high probability that other information from the same source is incorrect.

gintas2• 16 years ago

That one caught me too, even with zero knowledge about CUDA/OpenCL, I actually googled OpenCL to find out the fact of the matter.

rbanffy• 16 years ago

Am I the only one to notice the irony of an Intel CPU coupled to an AMD GPU?

edit: the downvotes show I am

jc-denton• 16 years ago

As a CUDA developer I'm pissed off by this decision.. Last time I checked OpenCL wasn't ready (much slower then CUDA) so I don't see how one could use the new Macs for serious GPU development :(

Also Adobes premiere uses CUDA.. maybe Apple wants to look their own product (Final cut) better on Macs?

stuff4ben• 16 years ago

I wonder if this signals a possible switch to AMD CPU's in the future? Maybe AMD offered them a great deal on graphics boards for enticing them to try their CPUs. Of course this is just pure speculation.

chrisbennet• 16 years ago

" Those who pay attention to details probably have noticed that since late 2009, Apple has been going in the direction of ATI’s OpenCL acceleration architecture, the competitor to NVIDIA’s CUDA."

It isn't really "ATI's OpenCL", NVIDIA supports OpenCL also. According to NVIDIA:

"NVIDIA has chaired the industry working group that defines the OpenCL standard since its inception and shipped the world’s first conformant GPU implementation for both Windows and Linux in June 2009."

Apple ditches NVIDIA, goes with ATI for their desktop lineup

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