Despite Nvidia's success in Windows-based PCs—it currently holds a 73 percent market share in discrete GPUs—the GPU maker hasn't had much luck with the Mac, which currently uses chips from rival AMD. However, a trio of job listings on Nvidia's website hint that the company may be developing a better relationship with Apple, including to "help produce the next revolutionary Apple products."
In a job listing for a Metal and Open GL software engineer Nvidia said it was looking for candidates to work "in partnership with Apple" to "define and shape the future of OpenGL both for computer platforms as well as next generation consumer electronics devices." That job listing has since been revised, but fortunately the original text has been preserved by the Google cache. Another job listing, which again has been tweaked slightly, was looking for a Metal Compute and Open CL software engineer that would "define and shape the future of Metal and OpenCL on Mac OS X."
While Nvidia GPUs have been used in Macs in the past, since the release of the Mac Pro in late 2013 Apple has moved all of its products that use a discrete GPU over to AMD. The priciest MacBook Pro, for example, uses AMD's 2GB Radeon R9 M370X GPU, while the 5K iMac uses a Radeon R9 M395 graphics processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory (an optional R9 M395X with 4GB of GDDR5 is available). While decent parts—the R9 M395 outperforms Nvidia's GTX 970M in most benchmarks—both are quickly becoming dated.
AMD recently released its Polaris 11-based RX 460 GPU as a discrete desktop part and for laptops, which easily outperforms the R9 M395. Meanwhile, Nvidia has ditched the differentiation between laptop and desktop parts entirely, cramming almost identical versions of its GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and flagship GTX 1080 parts into laptops and small form factor machines. While Apple has generally favoured power efficiency and cooling over raw performance with its choice of GPUs, the GTX 1060 with its 120W TDP would be a good fit for the iMac, and offer a huge boost in performance.
For the most part, however, Apple doesn't use discrete GPUs at all, with most of its products using Intel's high-end Iris Pro integrated graphics.
The job listings do not guarantee that Apple will use Nvidia chips either. The company has been known to pit two component manufacturers against each other in the past to the get the better deal, and given AMD currently has a price advantage over Nvidia's more premium offerings, it may once again come out on top. Recent rumours claimed that Apple would use AMD's Polaris architecture in a MacBook Pro refresh. That's not to mention that Nvidia has been supporting Apple products with drivers for years now, despite the last Mac to actually ship with an Nvidia GPU coming out in 2014.
Owners of the older, more expandable cheese grater Mac Pro, for example, can simply slot in a GTX 980 Ti and download some drivers from Nvidia's website to get it working. Those creating Hackintosh computers from PC parts have also benefited from Nvidia's continual stream of Mac drivers, with most of Nvidia's standard desktop parts working under Mac OS/OS X/macOS.
Still, wouldn't it be nice to see an iMac with the GTX 1080 as an option? It'd make gaming under Bootcamp a far more enticing proposition.
Listing image by Andrew Cunningham
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