This Shouldn’t Work on a Mac... But It Does

For the first time since 2019, you can run an Nvidia GPU on a Mac. Not through a virtual machine, not through a hack, through a real open- source driver that talks directly to the GPU over Thunderbolt. I just saw this announcement on Twitter from Tiny Corp. Here's a tweet. If you have a Thunderbolt or USB4 eGPU and a Mac, today is the day you've been waiting for. Apple finally approved our driver for both AMD and Nvidia. He forgot to mention that you need a Nvidia or AMD GPU, but I have that, too, and we'll test it out. This is pretty exciting stuff. I'm going to benchmark everything and give you the honest numbers, including the parts that aren't great yet. So, a little bit of a backstory. In 2018, Apple and Nvidia had a falling out. Apple dropped Nvidia support in Mac OS Mojave, killing CUDA on Mac entirely cuz they went all in on their own metal GPU framework. So for 7 years in the desert, if you wanted GPU support uh Nvidia compute on your Mac OS, you were out of luck. So then Tiny from Tiny Corp did something wild. They wrote their own Nvidia GPU driver from scratch. A Mac OS kernel extension called Tiny GPU. No Nvidia drivers needed, no Linux needed. You just plug a GPU into your Mac Thunderbolt port, approve the system extension, and it just works. Of course, don't forget the GPU. Here's what I'm working with. A Mac Mini with an Apple M4 Pro chip, 64 gigs of memory. I've already done this with three GPUs. All Blackwell RTX 5060 Ti, 5070 Ti, and a 5090.