Graphic Cards Macbook Pro mid 2012-NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M

[wash89akira]

I have a Mid 2012 Macbook Pro with a 

NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB

Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

In Affinity Designer only the Intel graphics card is available for hardware acceleration but not the NVIDA card, is there a way to fix this?

[LambtheJosh]

Have the same thing shown in Affinity Photo

[Jamster]

Hi. I posted the same issue earlier with my NVIDIA GTX 680 which is part of the same series of graphic cards.  Yours the the mobile version whilst mines in a Mac Pro but suspect it’s the same issue.  The Affinity developers are going to look at the issue that I’ve reported.  Mine shows as v3 as I’m running High Sierra. Guessing you are running Mojave as your screenshot shows as v4?  Hope they fix this soon.

[wash89akira]

True, I hope they fix these issue soon.

[Jamster]

I’ve just had a response from Affinity on the Nvidia issue that I’ve posted and they’ve replied to say that they do not support Nvidia cards at the moment (in regards to Metal acceleration). I’ve asked and they can’t confirm whether there are any plans to do so, which is a real shame. I don’t understand this distinction as the Metal API is a standard and Apple don’t make this distinction.  

[wash89akira]

That’s a shame, I guessing that the card is too old (computer time) for them to even bother supporting, and also Apple have put NVIDIA cards on their sh** list for a long time….but hey should support it. 

I will use my mac until it dies I guess….

[Jamster]

You might be able to use it with an external GPU as your MacBook Pro has thunderbolt connections.  Unfortunately my MacPro is older and doesn’t have thunderbolt.

[wash89akira]

I will see, my mac is older and at this point it’s not worth expending more money to upgrade it; it is still a good machine for what I can do with it, I will eventually update to newer one when this one dies. 

[Andy Somerfield]

All,

NVidia cards are not completely off our radar - the ones out there just don't really work at the moment. We use the "compute" aspect of Metal - not the "render" (games) aspect - and support for this in both the hardware and drivers for NVidia cards is flakey at best.

If we can ever get them to be stable, we will of course introduce support - but I wouldn't bank on it with the crop of Nvidia cards out there right now.

If Apple ever start using newer Nvidia cards again in modern hardware, we would expect compute support to be at the same level as Intel / AMD cards.

Thanks,

Andy.

 

[wash89akira]

Thank you for the reply; I completely understand the issue, any way Affinity Photo and Designer still run perform a million times better than the “other guys” did on a good day on my mac, keep up the great work you guys are doing.

Cheers!

[Jamster]

Hi Andy. I appreciate you sharing these details as I was concerned that it was either an arbitrary decision or a snub on Nvidia.  I know these cards are now relatively old and whilst Apple still supports them, they’re not proactively doing so.  Nvidia have their own Cuda compute technology but I suspect that’s different to the Metal compute API and it requires Nvidia own drivers instead of Apple’s drivers for these cards.

Thanks

 

Jamie

[tnargs]

You have a bigger problem. The 650M card has been disabled by Apple since 2017/18, due to some disagreement about licensing between Apple and Nvidia. By now I have given up on hoping that there will ever be a resolution and an updated graphics driver that re-enables the 650M.

cheers

[OFFDESIGN]

I would also like you to add support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2 GB that do support Metal. Thanks!

[mikew67]

Just to update this discussion, it looks like Affinity Designer (latest version, 1.10.5) still only supports the Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU and ignores the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M GPU on my MacBook Pro 10,1.  Here's the current Performance setting Preferences panel from the app.

Mike