The Developer Transition Kit, a Mac Mini with the A12Z processor from the iPad Pro.
When Apple announced their new “Apple Silicon” Macs, I did two things. First, I lamented the death of the professional Mac. There’s no way I, a software engineer (of Android, no less) who enjoys gaming, photo editing and graphics, as well as video editing, would be able to continue using Macs. Third party support will likely plummet, and this will push me off the platform. But after my initial shock, I realized something just as bad: my beloved AMD graphics cards may be going away permanently.
When AMD started touting their ThreadRipper and Ryzen lineups, I took notice. Sure, I don’t build PCs anymore, now that I’m on the Mac, but I still appreciate a powerful PC. Plus it allowed me to hold on to the hope that Apple would ditch Intel… for AMD. AMD has also been giving Nvidia a run for its money, even outperforming them in certain benchmarks, all for lower prices. It’s been a good few years for AMD, as they make themselves into a dominant player in both the CPU and GPU market. But there’s something on the A12Z processor that made me realize this was bad news for AMD.
Apple’s chips come with their own GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), and Apple’s quite proud of them.
Apple wasn’t going to be using AMD anymore.
But we weren’t certain yet. After all, if the devices have Thunderbolt 3, perhaps users could bring an eGPU. Maybe Apple would pair a dedicated GPU with their pro devices. However, a guidance from Apple seems to suggest that dedicated graphics cards are about to be a thing of the past, at least on the Mac.
We could be heading into some dark times, when Mac graphics performance can’t even exceed that of your iPhone.
Apple’s Guidance
During Apple’s keynote, Apple was clear that the processor in their Mac Mini dev kits would be the same as those in the iPad Pro. It’s an A12Z processor. This includes a GPU. However, Intel chips have often been paired with “integrated” graphics. These were often low power and low performance graphics. To supplement them, Apple and other PC manufacturers have dedicated graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia in place as well. There was a possibility that Apple would do the same here, providing their own GPU as well as one from AMD or Nvidia. However, a guidance from Apple to developers seems to suggest this won’t be a possibility.
The chart above comes directly from Apple. It seems to suggest the company will definitely only support their own GPUs in Apple Silicon Macs. We don’t yet have definitive word on whether or not external GPUs, or eGPUs, will be supported, however, this seems quite clear: Apple Silicon Macs won’t have third-party GPU support.
Developers creating software for that platform won’t have to worry about using renderers that support non-Apple GPUs. Note that the GPU architecture is different (Tile Based Deferred vs Immediate Mode). However, worth noting is that the Apple Silicon Macs will still support Metal GPU Family Mac 2, which means they should be able to play Metal API-based games made for Intel machines, as long as they’re using the latest version of Metal. However, many software developers still won’t be able to upgrade. We’ll definitely lose access to many of these games and software as Apple forces a completely different architecture on the few developers actually making software for macOS.
This isn’t 100% certain yet. Apple hasn’t even announced a single production Mac with Apple Silicon, so we won’t know if Apple will support 3rd party graphics until they announce a new Mac for consumers. Perhaps there’s still some hope on the horizon for a Mac with AMD or Nvidia graphics again. Perhaps there’s even hope for Apple to abandon this plan altogether. Hey, a girl can dream.
Sources:
- Joanna Nelius, Gizmodo
- Mike Peterson, AppleInsider