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OS X Promising GPU from Nvidia

Agree with Antonis there. They have spent the last 2 years swapping all their stuff to AMD and seem to have settled on them for graphics for the foreseeable future.
 
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The R9 Nano is close the GTX 980 in terms of performance/W. There's hope AMD has been working with Apple for custom GPU in iMacs, based on their recent design. HBM also enables smaller packages, which Apple likes.
I wouldn't be surprised in AMD GPUs worked better than nVidia's with Metal. They appear to be better than nVidia's on DX12.
 
Huntn said:
Has there been any rumors about the GeForce GTX 980 coming to Mac laptops?
Click to expand...

Considering the fact that the GeForce GTX 980 has a thermal profile of 165W, and the maximum wattage of a MacBook Pro power supply is 85W, what do you think?
 
This sure isn't going to happen in Mac laptops, which are all about slim and light. I've seen the new MIS laptop boasting a gtx 980 and it's the antithesis of a Macbook.
 
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Well, when I say "the likes of this" I don't necessarily mean that particular GPU but I do find it encouraging that kind of power is making its way to small form factors and the heat is manageable within the confines of any notebook/laptop.

I see that as good progress in the right direction. That's nice to hear about the AMD R9 mentioned above. I'm just encouraged in general that work is being done to make mobile GPUs perform to higher standards. Even the integrated GPUs are making some good gains and can play a lot of less demanding games well from what I've been reading on the forums here.
 
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Regarding the next iMac, I fear we are going to get the R9 M300 series. They are listed in el Capitan files.
 
While interesting, the thickness of these laptops is not something that Apple would want to do. I think the best we can hope for is an external GPU chassis solution like the ROG 700 in the linked article if Apple supports Thunderbolt 3.

Also, I would recommend anyone considering buying a GPU to wait. The current GPUs are still using TMSC's 28nm fabrication, and thus incredibly far behind current Samsung/Intel fab technology. Intel CPUs are 14nm and the A9 is rumored to be a 14nm as well. Standalone GPUs using transistor tech from 5 years ago, isn't helping GPUs advance their heat profile or feature set. When they get up-to-date they can really jump forward again.
 
Fortunately I don't expect to be upgrading for another two years, so refresh after next one basically. At that time I am going to make a choice between another iMac or a Mini sharing a screen with other stuff for AAA gaming. Whether that winds up being a console, Windows PC, both or whatever I have no idea yet but I am open to both possibilities depending on what hardware is out then and at what costs. At this point it would probably take a lot to sway me from going the route with the Mini for OS X and complete flexibility for other options. You can really put together a very nice setup that offers best of both worlds for less than a tricked out 27" iMac costs. I love my iMac but I think it'll be hard to justify the outlay again next time given the available alternatives.

I know this much, I will never use a Windows PC again for anything other than gaming.
 
Dirtyharry50 said:
I'd like to see the likes of this make its way to Macs...

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/introducing-the-geforce-gtx-980-notebooks?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRoiua3BZKXonjHpfsX86u0uXaW+h4kz2EFye+LIHETpodcMScpnMq+TFAwTG5toziV8R7HAKs1v3NsQXBXg#cid=Gaming-Email-CTA-Sep-2015-US&utm_source=Gaming-Email-Sep-2015-US&utm_medium=email&utm_content=CTA-Graphic&utm_campaign=Gaming-Email-Sep-2015-US
Click to expand...

I'd just like to see external Thunderbolt GPUs make it into the consumer market and be OS X compatible. That would be the perfect answer, really - portable product for when you need to go about, and then you can hook up some GPU over Thunderbolt and smash 30fps natively in Ultra on the internal display. Thunderbolt 2 certainly should have the bandwidth to get at least 85% of the performance from a desktop GPU.

I know there are currently home workaround solutions but that still has to run through an external monitor to work, and they're fairly bulky/have to be setup each time, which defeats the purpose. Hopefully Apple is strongly considering this!
 
Not so sure if the eGPUs are the perfect solution in the long term. Even as they are now, they are bottlenecked by the thunderbolt bandwidth. And it is only logical to assume that faster GPUs in the future will be even more bottlenecked by that. Eventually, there will be a thunderbolt 3 version, hopefully with a higher bandwidth, but this will, of course, be available for the new macs. So, there we are again, changing machines will still be a necessity.
 
PCIe bandwidth isn't much a bottleneck as far as frame rate is concerned. Once the textures are loaded in VRAM, performance shouldn't depend on the connection speed between your CPU and GPU...
 
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