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Metal hardware acceleration not available with Nvidia GTX 680


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I've just downloaded Photos 1.7 and I've checked the performance settings and Hardware Acceleration isn't available for my GPU, but I think that it should be.  I'm running an old cheese grater style Mac Pro, but with High Sierra and an NVIDIA GTX 680, which is an Apple Metal supported card.  My graphics card isn't listed under Hardware Acceleration and instead it states 'no compatible GPU'.  I've checked my Graphics information on the System Report and it states 'Metal - Supported, feature set macOS GPUFamily1 v3', so I would expect it to be compatible.  Does Photo 1.7 have additional hardware requirements for Metal support?

375868685_GTX680.jpeg.62a8d15139f13d291f82d28c1f4d96fc.jpegPreferences.jpeg.45c90b6ea4b87fb984d5c493224376c0.jpeg

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Thanks. I've just doubled check and with 1.7, we support whatever graphics card you have installed( Dedicated, integrated, or e-GPU) - as long it supports Metal Compute. I could not find an official list from Apple stating which cards are supported or not, but I presume your card is not compatible if it's not showing up in Designer. 

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@GabrielM.  The first screenshot is taken from the System Report on my Mac (go to the Apple logo > About this Mac > System Report...).  The entry for Metal states 'supported' and then gives further details, which means that my Graphics Card supports Metal and that my Operating System recognises this.  That's to be expected as Apple have stated that the NVIDIA GTX 680 supports Metal (their support document is HT208898).  I'm running High Sierra (10.13.6).

So the question is really why Affinity Photo isn't recognising this as a Metal supported card?  Affinity 1.7 is supposed to have better support for discrete GPUs compared to 1.6 which only supported integrated GPUs. 

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Hi GabrielM.  Can you confirm whether there are any plans to support Nvidia cards?  Technically there shouldn’t be any differences as the Metal API is a standard regardless of manufacturer.  I think that the only effort of doing so would be in testing. It seems like a very arbitrary decision to support AMD but not Nvidia - it’s not a distinction that Apple makes.

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1 hour ago, Jamster said:

 Can you confirm whether there are any plans to support Nvidia cards?

I cannot confirm nor deny this. At the moment we do not support nVidia. That's as far as I can confirm it. Sorry :(

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  • 1 month later...

No Hardware acceleration for nVidia ?
Only for weak AMD devices and fancy overpriced Apple ?

That is embarrassing that I have (overpriced) nVidia RTX2080Ti and its power cannot be used by Affinity ?

It is so embarrassing like not working drag-drop files to the batch job or stack job and constant problem with badly saved HDR file headers ( HDR files saved by Affinity Photo are not readable with UE4, but those from Ps work fine ).

Sorry is not enough. Fix it please. :D

 

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Excuse me but - are 2080Ti's even supported anywhere in macOS?

I'm sure you can somehow install it in a cheesegrater but it must be so way out of sync with what Apple offers and supports that you may as well sell it to me for a really good price - and get yourself a Vega something something. :)

 

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On 8/6/2019 at 12:49 AM, thomasp said:

Excuse me but - are 2080Ti's even supported anywhere in macOS?

I'm sure you can somehow install it in a cheesegrater but it must be so way out of sync with what Apple offers and supports that you may as well sell it to me for a really good price - and get yourself a Vega something something. :)

 

I think sinesium is a Windows user.
Only DirectX is supported on Windows version for now and there's no hardware compute acceleration yet.
 

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33 minutes ago, ashf said:

I believe Nvidia cards are not supported on Metal2(Metal Computing).
So Apple is the one to fix this.

I’m aware that Apple no longer ship with Nvidia cards, but my Nvidia card officially supports Metal according to Apple, see support article - HT208898. Both the GTX680 and K5000 support Metal officially. There are other Nvidia cards that unofficially support Metal too (ie Kepler based or newer) but never had an official Mac version of the card and don’t have native Apple drivers.

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8 minutes ago, Jamster said:

I’m aware that Apple no longer ship with Nvidia cards, but my Nvidia card officially supports Metal according to Apple, see support article - HT208898. Both the GTX680 and K5000 support Metal officially. There are other Nvidia cards that unofficially support Metal too (ie Kepler based or newer) but never had an official Mac version of the card and don’t have native Apple drivers.

I mean Metal Computing in Metal2, not display renderer.
As op said, Metal itself can be enabled as display renderer with some nvidia cards.

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20 minutes ago, ashf said:

I mean Metal Computing in Metal2, not display renderer.
As op said, Metal itself can be enabled as display renderer with some nvidia cards.

Yeah - that’s why I raised this thread as my Nvidia GTX 680 supports Metal, including Metal 2, but Photo Affinity only enables Metal support for display rendering currently.  Affinity have responded on another similar thread and have said that they might enable metal computing on Nvidia Metal cards in the future. I hope they do, as I don’t want to switch to an AMD card.

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1 minute ago, Jamster said:

Yeah - that’s why I raised this thread as my Nvidia GTX 680 supports Metal, including Metal 2, but Photo Affinity only enables Metal support for display rendering currently.  Affinity have responded on another similar thread and have said that they might enable metal computing on Nvidia Metal cards in the future. I hope they do, as I don’t want to switch to an AMD card.

Oh, I didn't notice you are the op. sorry.
I assume what Serif said may depends on if Apple will fully supports nvidia I think.

 

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It looks like Metal support is divided into two basic GPU "families" by Apple right now: "family 1" offers less functionality than "family 2".

From what little documentation I have been able to scrounge up, there are NO nVidia cards in "family 2": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/mtlfeatureset/mtlfeatureset_macos_gpufamily2_v1?language=objc

 

I don't know what specifically the Affinity apps need to provide metal compute acceleration, but clearly Apple has not been spending the time to make nVidia cards work with the full feature set of Metal.

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5 hours ago, fde101 said:

It looks like Metal support is divided into two basic GPU "families" by Apple right now: "family 1" offers less functionality than "family 2".

From what little documentation I have been able to scrounge up, there are NO nVidia cards in "family 2": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/mtlfeatureset/mtlfeatureset_macos_gpufamily2_v1?language=objc

 

I don't know what specifically the Affinity apps need to provide metal compute acceleration, but clearly Apple has not been spending the time to make nVidia cards work with the full feature set of Metal.

That doesn’t surprise me that Nvidia cards aren’t part of “family 2” as Apple stopped dealing with Nvidia around 2012/2013. The AMD cards belonging to “family 2” are much more recent. There are older AMD cards which support metal that aren’t on that list either, such as the SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition.

There’s another support post on this topic which is more informing, as Andy from Affinity explained that they weren’t currently able to get Nvidia cards to work reliably, as the hardware and drivers are flakey...

 

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