Regarding Topaz Video and Photo: now that NVIDIA has introduced RTX Spark what does the near future hold for PCs’ local rending capabilities-quality and speed outlooks? And how will Topaz development around Spark affect local rendering development for Macs? Will Macs be left in the dust? Should I plan for purchasing a a dedicated PC with a NVIDIA RTX Spark chip? Thanks!
Too early to tell, since this was just announced and details on actual availability are not set. It could be very interesting to see what these can do when they are actually released, provided there is stock available and the price is reasonable.
The RTX Spark is pure marketing hype.
Its brute horsepower is a joke.
So : What’s the point of running a massive model with garbage inference speeds? Unless you’re running workloads 24/7, a laptop like this makes absolutely no sense.
And the price is outrageous! You can almost get a Blackwell 6000 for that price!
ARM is actually a beast of an architecture, but pairing ARM with Windows is still the ultimate dumpster fire.
What if Spark will be different this time around on Windows and brings us an Apple M experience?
Do you truly see Windows improving over time?
The criticism is becoming increasingly harsh.
The whole world is crying out about the bloatware it has become.
While I don’t particularly like macOS because it’s so closed off, I don’t like Windows either, which has become a real plague in 2026.
Big announcements like the K2 initiative currently only result in patches that continue to break more than they fix.
The latest shame is the catastrophic handling of Windows multithreading compared to Linux.
The things that made that work for Apple are the things like only using a very narrow set of hardware. That’s actually the core of the reason why Topaz Video cannot work as nice/fast on Macs today.
As a software developer, I can tell you, the first two years of Apple silicon were not smooth by any measure for my coworkers that made the switch.
To me, the M Chips are build around a worflow that has been common in 2015 - 2018.
Develop single RAW image with Lightroom, cut a social media video recorded with a smartphone or a Go-Pro, record a podcast - no AI.
That’s interesting, I worked for Adobe support till last year and I remember how fast they transitioned their software to Apple M Silicon and we were blown away how efficient it was. That’s why I was referring to Apple M as a positive example.
If I’m not mistaken, Apple worked with Adobe behind the scenes before they launched the M1 to make sure it was working well—Adobe products were one of the more lucrative uses of Macs at the time. None of the programs we used to make other programs became truly compatible with the M1 for a long time after the launch.
Indeed that is true, I also catched from a press release they are working closely with Apple after they put the Apple M on the market, Iooking at the speedy progress and great success of Apple MI thought to myself the must be working with other devs behind the scenes as well but apparently it was not quite the case.
Also I agree with the previous person how bad Windows 11 is these days, sometimes I wish I should have reinstalled Win 20 instead of Win 11 on my new PC because it was better. But when I saw the new Witcher 3 expansion will require Windows 11 as minimum I am glad I installed Win 11
