The announcement of Apple Silicon indicated an important farewell for users of the ecosystem of Ma Intel. In the end, however, this will not be the only separation suffered by users with the transition.
Apple engineers had already announced the change to WWDC20 sessions, but only today was it brought up by leaker @never_released: Macs equipped with Ma chips will apparently only be compatible with GPUs of the company itself. We will therefore have to say goodbye too OMG and NVIDIA.
Information can be seen in the session “Bring you Metal app to Apple Silicon Macs”, starting at 4:36. On video, the engineer Gokhan Avkarogullari (director of GPU software at Apple) talks about the differences between Ma's graphics solutions compared to those of other companies, which currently equip Macs; the session brings a guide for developers to make the transition of their applications developed with the Metal API to run smoothly on future machines.
For interested developers or users, other sessions dealing with the same topic can be checked: “Optimize Metal Performance for Apple Silicon Macs”, “Harness Apple GPUs with Metal” and “Explore the new system architecture of Apple Silicon Macs” just a few of them.
Although this is the first time the matter has been dealt with publicly (after official confirmation, that is), the news is hardly a surprise to anyone: Apple clearly wants to shut down the Macs, and focus on GPUs themselves it is just a natural continuation of the ideas behind the Apple Silicon as a whole.
Apple's relationship with NVIDIA has been in shambles for a long time, but AMD still has good ties to Ma: she is the one who produces the graphics cards for all of Ma's toughest machines, like the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the iMac Pro and Mac Pro. The news, therefore, should represent a certain shock to the company.
In addition, some questions arise from this transition: will support for external GPUs die? How will professionals who need extra graphics power, even on machines that already have powerful chips? And the adaptation of professional applications (modeling, video editing, rendering and many others), how can it be done?
For the answers, we will need to wait for the next months or even years.