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Frequently Asked Questions About NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Cards

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zickboom

zickboom

macrumors newbie
Feb 4, 2015
10
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Careful, last 10.10.3 upgrade doesn't work with my gtx 980
Is there anybody which have same ?

Some issue, reboot with command, option, R and P keys pressed three times, then press command and T...
The last nvidia driver doesn't work anymore... just few days

Please Steve, be back !
 
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MacGamver

MacGamver

macrumors regular
Aug 16, 2013
236
15
snipper said:
I'm kinda new to the whole PC-card thing so I didn't dare updating from 10.10.1 to 10.10.2 with my recently acquired MSI Twin FrozrIII nVidia GTX660 2GB.

Couldn't find / didn't understand if this was supposed to be solved with 10.10.3 so I just did the upgrade to 10.10.3 since I had the old 8800 GT still laying around as a backup.

I just wanted to let you know 10.10.3 works fine with the standard drivers on an nVidia GTX 660. You can update the CUDA web driver after starting up.
Click to expand...

I don't get it then, there are reports of a 650 working with the stock drivers, and this 660, so it can't be the 600 series support dropped. What's the deal? Why is my EVGA 650ti not working with the stock Apple drivers?

Also, MVC, when you say "Very bad idea" (to leave an unused card in a PCIe slot) would you care to elaborate? I trust your experience enough to pull the card out anyway, but I'd like to know why?
 
M

MacVidCards

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MacGamver said:
I don't get it then, there are reports of a 650 working with the stock drivers, and this 660, so it can't be the 600 series support dropped. What's the deal? Why is my EVGA 650ti not working with the stock Apple drivers?

Also, MVC, when you say "Very bad idea" (to leave an unused card in a PCIe slot) would you care to elaborate? I trust your experience enough to pull the card out anyway, but I'd like to know why?
Click to expand...

I don't have prior experience where leaving something with 1/3 of it's power connected has blown it up, but do you want to provide that?

Would you hook up some of the power wires for a car stereo and be surprised if that created trouble?

It's just not a good idea, aside from having access to the PCIE power of 75 Watts it also blocks air flow. If you have +12 Volts at one end of a circuit and +5 volts at another, you effectively have -7 volts going the wrong way. Clever designers would have a diode to keep that from happening but I wouldn't look at leaving the power that way over a long time as being a good practice.

Many GPUs will halt boot and put a message on their ports that says "connect PCIE power" if they are connected like that. There were several 4870s that created that message even when power was applied. Cindori had a part of one of his apps that did nothing but turn off the "plug in your power cords" message for an XFX 4870.
 
zickboom

zickboom

macrumors newbie
Feb 4, 2015
10
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flowrider said:
Go to the previous page and look at Post #2071.

Lou
Click to expand...

Fine.
I saw it but i thought i got this version.
It was a mistake.
I've a trouble at start during few seconds, the back screen is a quater of the monitor.
It's like that since first 10.10.3.

Thank you,
 
M

Melvin Frohike

macrumors newbie
Jul 5, 2008
14
0
Hi,

i have a Mac Pro 2008 with 12GB of RAM and a Geforce GTX 970 graphics card. I am running Yosemite with the latest NVidia web drivers.
I would think that i should get great performance playing games like Team Fortress 2 or Insurgency.
However, even with all graphics settings set to low, i still have very low fps. When the view distance is large, i consistently have less than 20 fps. I previously used a GTX 650; that had only slightly worse performance than the 970.

Does anyone have an idea how to improve performance of these games? Or is my CPU or RAM too much of a bottleneck?
 
snipper

snipper

macrumors regular
Feb 9, 2004
233
30
Melvin Frohike said:
Hi,

i have a Mac Pro 2008 with 12GB of RAM and a Geforce GTX 970 graphics card. […]
Click to expand...

For starters, this is probably not a Mac specific card and therefore, although it will fit the PCI Extreme slot and even work, the system doesn't know exactly what it's dealing with and therefore will be set to the minimum standards, being PCI Express '1' (there is no such thing, but I mean the version before '2').

To get it loaded on startup, it needs to support EFI. The other guys can explain it much better.
 
M

Melvin Frohike

macrumors newbie
Jul 5, 2008
14
0
snipper said:
For starters, this is probably not a Mac specific card and therefore, although it will fit the PCI Extreme slot and even work, the system doesn't know exactly what it's dealing with and therefore will be set to the minimum standards, being PCI Express '1' (there is no such thing, but I mean the version before '2').

To get it loaded on startup, it needs to support EFI. The other guys can explain it much better.
Click to expand...
Thank you for your reply. This is not a flashed card, which is why it is running on PCI Express 1. Other than that, according to this thread, it should be fully supported, with the difference between PCI Express 1 & 2 being negligible. The system report shows the card correctly:

Code: 
  Chipsatz-Modell:	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
  Typ:			GPU
  Bus:			PCIe
  Steckplatz:		Slot-2
  PCIe-Lane-Breite:	x16
  VRAM (gesamt):	4095 MB
  Hersteller:		NVIDIA (0x10de)
  Geräte-ID:		0x13c2
  Versions-ID:		0x00a1
  ROM-Version:		VBIOS 84.04.31.00.07
 
pixxelpusher

pixxelpusher

macrumors member
Aug 1, 2011
92
17
Melvin Frohike said:
Hi,

i have a Mac Pro 2008 with 12GB of RAM and a Geforce GTX 970 graphics card. I am running Yosemite with the latest NVidia web drivers.
I would think that i should get great performance playing games like Team Fortress 2 or Insurgency.
However, even with all graphics settings set to low, i still have very low fps. When the view distance is large, i consistently have less than 20 fps. I previously used a GTX 650; that had only slightly worse performance than the 970.

Does anyone have an idea how to improve performance of these games? Or is my CPU or RAM too much of a bottleneck?
Click to expand...


I'm experiencing similar with a GTX 770 I just bought (see my post on the pervious page #2064).

Have you tried the 970 under boot camp Windows? Using something like LuxMark or Heaven to benchmark it? Mine is about twice as fast under Windows than it is under OS X.

I haven't found a definitive answer either, but it seems OS X is the culprit for running non mac cards slowly. Would love to find a way to make it run faster if anyone can figure it out.
 
M

MacVidCards

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Melvin Frohike said:
Hi,

i have a Mac Pro 2008 with 12GB of RAM and a Geforce GTX 970 graphics card. I am running Yosemite with the latest NVidia web drivers.
I would think that i should get great performance playing games like Team Fortress 2 or Insurgency.
However, even with all graphics settings set to low, i still have very low fps. When the view distance is large, i consistently have less than 20 fps. I previously used a GTX 650; that had only slightly worse performance than the 970.

Does anyone have an idea how to improve performance of these games? Or is my CPU or RAM too much of a bottleneck?
Click to expand...

I have found 3,1 to have a glass ceiling in OpenGl.

Using the Uningine Valley test, all of the cards below a 7970/680 scale nicely in their scores.

Anything above gets the SAME score. 35fps.

A GTX770 gets 35fps

A brand new fastest card on the planet Titan-X gets....35fps

I have a 3.2 Dual Quad. Try running Uningine Valley with "ExtremeHD" preset, my guess is you will get 35 fps, if so it is running fine.

Sadly, unflashed cards only run at PCIE 1.0 in a 3,1, unless Nvidia has updated the code in driver.
 
M

Melvin Frohike

macrumors newbie
Jul 5, 2008
14
0
Thank you for your reply.

I do not get 35 fps consistently. Attached is my benchmark score. As you can see, i get more than 35 fps occasionally with my average being at 31.4

The situation is similar in games. When there is little to draw, (e.g. i am staring at a wall) i get great fps.

Is the 35 fps ceiling you encountered only happening for PCIE 1.0 or 2.0? Or is that an entirely separate issue? If so, how much of a performance difference is there between the two?
 

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M

MacVidCards

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I wasn't clear.

The maximum score you will see on a 3,1 is 35 on that final tally screen.

That same 970 in a 4,1 would hit 44 or 45

It is an OpenGL thing due to ....?????

Bus, ram, not sure. OpenCl and CUDA scores in benchmarks are much closer to 4,1

But it stands to reason that if games use OpenGL and 3,1 has a OpenGL issue in Valley that it will have similar issue in games.
 
A

Asgorath

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 30, 2012
1,573
479
MacVidCards said:
I wasn't clear.

The maximum score you will see on a 3,1 is 35 on that final tally screen.

That same 970 in a 4,1 would hit 44 or 45

It is an OpenGL thing due to ....?????

Bus, ram, not sure. OpenCl and CUDA scores in benchmarks are much closer to 4,1

But it stands to reason that if games use OpenGL and 3,1 has a OpenGL issue in Valley that it will have similar issue in games.
Click to expand...

AFAIK the issue is simply the slow (by today's standards) CPU in the 3,1 just not being able to feed work quickly enough to any reasonably modern GPU. CL and CUDA have much less overhead at the API level compared with GL, so they are able to let the GPU stretch its legs a bit more.
 
geoplr

geoplr

macrumors newbie
Apr 11, 2015
7
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Greece
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OS-SEX

OS-SEX

macrumors regular
Jan 12, 2012
116
144
OS-SEX said:
I am not able to install this driver version as I have not updated to the supplemental update however if I update to this supplemental update before installing the new driver, I'll boot to a black screen. Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

Well I solved my own problem by downgrading to the last beta driver. I was then able to safely do the supplemental 10.10.3 update and finally could install the latest Nvidia web driver. Hope this can help someone else with the same issue I had.
 
MacGamver

MacGamver

macrumors regular
Aug 16, 2013
236
15
OS-SEX said:
Well I solved my own problem by downgrading to the last beta driver. I was then able to safely do the supplemental 10.10.3 update and finally could install the latest Nvidia web driver. Hope this can help someone else with the same issue I had.
Click to expand...

Can you install that beta driver over top of the web driver? I have 10.10.3 and it's web driver right now, without the supplemental update.

Also, can I make a USB boot stick to do future updates via booting from it, then patching, then updating web drivers?
 
OS-SEX

OS-SEX

macrumors regular
Jan 12, 2012
116
144
MacGamver said:
Can you install that beta driver over top of the web driver? I have 10.10.3 and it's web driver right now, without the supplemental update.

Also, can I make a USB boot stick to do future updates via booting from it, then patching, then updating web drivers?
Click to expand...

Yes, I can confirm that you can install the beta driver over the web driver. That's just what I did. Not sure about your second question.
 
M

MacVidCards

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MacGamver said:
Can you install that beta driver over top of the web driver? I have 10.10.3 and it's web driver right now, without the supplemental update.

Also, can I make a USB boot stick to do future updates via booting from it, then patching, then updating web drivers?
Click to expand...

This is a very good question and may hold the answer for many folks.

When NVIDIA puts the first driver out for 10.10.4 it will be trying to match Build "14E" of OSX.

This is because they won't know in advance what the future builds will be. When they release the final version for the first 10.10.4 it will match the final build number of "14E396" (I have no idea what it will actually be, just a placeholder)

Point being the Beta has a wild card match, anything starting with "14E" while each security update and iWatch compatibilty update will get some number assigned in future that will break the one matched to "14E396" but still work fine with "14E", all else being equal.

So in theory you could ride out all of the frivolous updates running the Beta, though you may suffer decreased performance.

The other thought would be to make a copy of the Nvdastartup kext from the Beta. You could install it right before a build number update as it is this kext that makes it breaks the match. As it is already signed with the Tim Cook seal of approval it wouldn't require dev mode. If you wanted your 14E396 Nvdastartup kext to work with 14E403 you could probably do that right before running the OS update, or you could edit the plist to match for 14E403, but then you would need kext dev mode since you broke Tim's seal.

Keep in mind this is all speculation on the future. These methods might work or Apple could toss a new monkey wrench in. YMMV
 
jblagden

jblagden

macrumors 65816
Aug 16, 2013
1,162
641
Overclocking Question: Windows-OS X

If a graphics card, say a MSI GT 740, was overclocked with Afterburner in Windows, would the overclocking work in OS X, or would there be no change in the graphics card's performance in OS X?
 
C

costasppc

macrumors newbie
Sep 7, 2008
2
0
Hello,

I have a simple question, sorry if this has been mentioned before:
For the latest OS X (10.9, 10.10) and the upcoming, is there a way to have EFI boot screens in Nvidia cards?

Best regards

Cp
 
pixxelpusher

pixxelpusher

macrumors member
Aug 1, 2011
92
17
Melvin Frohike said:
Thank you for your reply.

I do not get 35 fps consistently. Attached is my benchmark score. As you can see, i get more than 35 fps occasionally with my average being at 31.4

The situation is similar in games. When there is little to draw, (e.g. i am staring at a wall) i get great fps.

Is the 35 fps ceiling you encountered only happening for PCIE 1.0 or 2.0? Or is that an entirely separate issue? If so, how much of a performance difference is there between the two?
Click to expand...

Was curious how my GTX770 compared so used the same settings. Definitely shows how poor OS X currently is, and for gaming running bootcamp is the way to go with almost double performance in Windows through DirectX11.

So I guess the question still stands, is there a way to make these Nvidia cards run better under Mac OS or is this just how it is?
 

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flowrider

flowrider

macrumors 604
Nov 23, 2012
7,228
2,952
pixxelpusher said:
Definitely shows how poor OS X currently is, and for gaming running bootcamp is the way to go with almost double performance in Windows through DirectX11.

So I guess the question still stands, is there a way to make these Nvidia cards run better under Mac OS or is this just how it is?
Click to expand...

Really? My score with my MVC Modified Gigabyte GTX780 on my 5.1.

You're problem is the hardware (Mac Pro 2,1) not the Mac OS.

Lou
 

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