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Comment by ap46 | Hacker News Reader

Once the Pascal drivers come out, no spec upgrade from Apple to the Mac Pro lineup will pull people back from making their own Hackintoshes with 1060/80(Ti) & going nuts with rendering or machine learning applications!

Cheaper hardware with top of the line specs, upgradeability & compatibility with Windoze, *NIX & macOS.

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I think this is an overly optimistic view. While the new nVidia drivers might support newer cards, they don't update the severely outdated OpenGL 4.1 stack, fix any of the bugs in the OpenGL stack, or provide Vulkan support.

In short, it's difficult for me to be excited about this given you'll effectively be using your 2017 nVidia card with 2010 limitations.

Perhaps the story is different for CUDA support, and maybe Metal somewhat makes up for the lack of modern OpenGL support, but this feels more like a pyrrhic victory.

CUDA works just fine. The lack of up-to-date OGL support is a non-issue for most professional applications.

Or they might switch to Linux where that all 'just works'.

For those who think this is sarcasm, the last update to the nVidia drivers fixed most of my issues on Ubuntu. I only have a 980 and not doing machine learning professionally, but this thing handles any game I throw at it.

> I only have a 980

It's such a tribute to the modern semi conductor industry that you can write that so casually, and yet, we're talking about an approximately 5 TFLOPS co-processor here.

Not all that long ago that would have been a rack full of very expensive hardware and not all that long before that half a floor in a DC.

Welcome to the future.

And you're right, definitely not sarcastic.

For gaming or home use its a big deal, for professionals, why waste time with as single 2 year old card.

A card like that is still more than powerful enough to learn with. That's technically still 'home' use but as a professional entering a field you could get a lot of mileage out of it, especially if you already have it.

I wouldn't buy one new or second hand to study with today.

Yeah that's fine too. But for those with development work that entails Xcode usage, constant OS switching & time spent managing files & using (some great) apps is better served with macOS.

Might not pull people back but this could be a clear indication that the next Mac Pro will have user changeable hardware which is a step back in the right direction.

> Once the Pascal drivers come out

It was released last week, though still considered a beta.

I've had no issues at all with my 1080 Ti, running 3x screens at 1440P and CUDA with latest version works perfectly stable.

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