Nvidia GPUs Finally Work on Macs! But Hold Your Horses on Gaming
Great news for Mac users who’ve been itching to use Nvidia graphics cards! Remember the times when you could game or utilize Nvidia’s CUDA on your Mac without a hitch? Well, that came to a halt when Apple decided to shift gears and adopt its own rendering system. But now, thanks to a brand-new open-source driver, it looks like you can potentially get back into the AppleCUDA groove.
Tech enthusiast and YouTuber Alex Ziskind recently shared a video showcasing this exciting development. He hooked up a GeForce RTX 50-series graphics card to a Mac mini using an eGPU dock and a USB4 connection. The magic ingredient? An application called TinyGPU, created by the tiny corp, which also rolled out the special driver enabling this compatibility.
If you own a Thunderbolt or USB4 eGPU alongside your Mac, today might just be the day you’ve been waiting for! Apple has given the green light for the driver to work with both AMD and Nvidia cards, meaning you can skip the complicated homebrew setups. Just connect your hardware (making sure that graphics card is powered up), install the driver and the app, set up your compiler, and you should be good to go!
However, before you start dreaming of epic gaming sessions with that extra RTX 5090 chilling in your closet, hold on a second! The current focus of tiny corp’s efforts is primarily on AI applications. In Ziskind’s tests, while the three RTX 50-series cards certainly outperformed the M4 Pro in the Mac mini, it became clear that the software stack wasn’t fully tapping into the potential of the Blackwell GPU.
This doesn’t take away from the fantastic work done by tiny corp, though! If you’re sporting an AMD RDNA 3, Nvidia Ampere, or any newer GPU, you can dive in and explore what AI projects you can run on your Mac.
Since the runtimes from tiny corp are open-source and accessible on GitHub, it wouldn’t be shocking if someone in the community manages to adapt it to run games too. However, that’s likely to be quite the uphill battle!