Apple Announces Alliance With Adobe, NVIDIA, and Others to Develop Pixar's 3D Standard

Apple today announced that it is working with Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, NVIDIA, and Linux to promote and develop Pixar's 3D Universal Scene Description technology.

Apple Alliance for OpenUSD AOUSD logo
Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) was created by Pixar Animation Studios as a 3D scene depiction technology that promises significant interoperability among tools, data, and workflows. It is widely recognized for its efficiency and ability simplifying cinematic content creation. Mike Rockwell, Apple's vice president of the Vision Products Group, commented:

OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications. Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard.

The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) seeks to augment the functionalities of OpenUSD and encourage a high level of 3D tool and data interoperability. It will formulate written specifications to define the features of OpenUSD and promote widespread adoption, integration, and implementation of the technology. To learn more about the Alliance for OpenUSD, visit the organization's website.

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Top Rated Comments

smetvid Avatar
18 months ago

Unpopular related opinion: I wish Apple didn’t move to ARM SoC’s. The inability to use third party GPU’s (even though Apple cut ties with nVidia) and RAM esp on the Mac Pro is criminal while creating a disposable lineup that creates more waste.

Certainly, they’re faster with much less power but at a larger cost. I wish Apple kept working with Intel as they did when the MacBook Air was released with a custom CPU only Apple had. I wonder if Intel and Apple would have benefitted longterm yet I sense Cook wanted to push for already used ARM SoC’s from iDevices to Mac’s to increase profits.

I’ve used PowerMac’s and Mac Pro’s for years and this was my first time not upgrading to the new one ($7000 for an SoC system??? Ridiculou). Love my Mac Studio Ultra but miss upgradability and being able to cold boot Windows. Intel offered a truly all-in-one system that businesses loved; that sector is gone.

I hope Apple finds a way to allow eGPU’s/discrete GPU’s and RAM upgrades using a middleman controller of sorts - I doubt latency will be hit that hard and even so, I’ll take a speed hit to be able to add more to my systems and keep them longer. nVidia is still a necessity for many.
The MBA is now 10x better of a laptop since moving away from Intel. Even a lot of video pros are using them as well as designers, musicians and app developers.

I had a eGPU and while yes it provided some level of boost it sucked trying to get it to work well. I get much better performance with Apple Silicon GPUs now than I ever did with a eGPU. TB4 was just too much of a bottleneck and required too many hacks to get it working right. A Mac mini M2 Pro easily beats whatever I could do with my Vega 56 eGPU.

The move to Apple Silicon is hands down on of the best things Apple has done in years. The only people that are really negatively impacted are those that ran bootcamp on Intel Macs in a vain attempt to have windows gaming on a Mac and maybe a handful of users trying to use Windows only productivity apps on a single machine.

For the cost and hassle of it all one is now much better off just getting a M2 MBA and a cheap 3060 gaming PC laptop. Best of both worlds with no farting around. Costs the same or less than a good eGPU without any hassle at all.

The mixed use users were always a niche group at best anyway. Apple was never goign to keep around support to make 1% of users happy who love to tinker and use machine in ways they were not designed for.
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
iBluetooth Avatar
18 months ago

Only thing Apple will ever work on with Nvidia, such pettiness on their part.
You mean after Nvidia didn't want to replace their failed components and let Apple cover the cost. I would be angry for a long time after being burned like that.
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MacLawyer Avatar
18 months ago
Apple makes peace with Nvidia? Excellent! Sadly it comes a few years too late.
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DaveEcc Avatar
18 months ago
Microsoft partnered with nVidia for the original XBox, then dumped them and went AMD. Sony then used them for Playstation 3, then dumped them and went AMD. Everyone seems to regret whatever partnership they make with nVidia.

Surely if everyone thinks nVidia is a bad partner, the problem isn't Apple, but nVidia, as desirable as their GPUs are.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
mcnallym Avatar
18 months ago

Only thing Apple will ever work on with Nvidia, such pettiness on their part.
And yet the history is well known and documented.

The last Nvidia GPU in a Mac was 2015 iMac, whereas the GPU issue on Macbooks was 2007/2008 so even Nvidia dumping the costs on Apple when they gave millions of dollars to the likes of Dell over the issue wasn't the cause of Nvidia disappearing from Mac OS

Mojave beta had support for Nvidia GPU's and would have continued if Nvidia had been prepared to supply Metal Only drivers without insisting on CUDA.

Apple - moving forward we want only Metal API to be used.
Nvidia - we insist on CUDA support for our drivers as well for your Systems.

When one of those 2 is the customer then the Customer wins.

Apple insisted on Metal and they doing the buying so the Customer here. Nvidia insisting on including CUDA so got told no thanks.

Whilst not Apple not blameless here then Nvidia just as pig headed in insisting on something that there customer saying NO to.

Of course the losers were the end users.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
GeoStructural Avatar
18 months ago
I love these types of collaborations ?. Sometimes competition is not best, when it comes to standards and interoperability collaboration is the way to go.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)