Nvidia plans to drop CUDA support for macOS

Apple and Nvidia have been on bad terms for over a decade, stemming from an unreliable lineup of Nvidia-powered MacBook Pro. Both Apple and Nvidia lost a lot of money when addressing these issues, and now Apple refuses to ship Nvidia-made graphics components within their systems. 

Now, in Nvidia’s latest CUDA release notes, the company has confirmed that CUDA 10.2 will be the last release of CUDA to support macOS. This means that all future versions of CUDA will not be supported on Apple devices. 

CUDA is Nvidia’s parallel computing platform, a toolset which allows software developers to get the most out of the company’s graphics hardware. Now, Apple’s macOS Mojave update has made Metal support within graphics cards a mandatory feature, with Apple refusing to add new Nvidia drivers to the platform. 

The story here is simple, Apple doesn’t want to support Nvidia graphics cards on its platform, and in turn, Nvidia doesn’t see the need to support Apple with its software developments. Today, only two Nvidia graphics cards are supported by macOS 10.14; Nvidia’s Quadro K5000 for Mac and Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 680 Mac Edition. 

Today’s professional applications for macOS are now optimised for Metal and OpenCL, both of which run well on AMD/Radeon graphics hardware. That said, Apple’s move has taken away Apple’s opportunity to support hardware-accelerated raytracing and Nvidia’s AI-accelerating Tensor cores on its platform. Apple will have to wait for Radeon to create equivalent hardware features before they can benefit from them, which could take a while.