Why being able to change PCIE cards is CRUCIAL, GTX750 Ti MAXWELL

We have boot screens and full display support working on GTX750 and GTX 750Ti. Nets and I are hoping to have some exciting news on these soon. (did I say GTX980?)

Amazingly, this "entry level" card produces results similar to a GTX470, on 150 fewer Watts of power !!!!

This is still at PCIE 1.0, mind you.

So, 150 Watts less power and heat for similar performance. Amazing increase in short time.

Imagine if the 2009 Mac Pro had a mid level GPU bolted in from 2009. Those nMPs are going to look like junky old iMacs in short time.Anyone want to see how a 2009 era GT120 does?

Instead we can upgrade to modern GPUs like this that make even former high power GPUs seem weak.

As soon as we finish 5.0 support (and add some new "protection" methods) we will be offering these as Mac EFI cards. They work great already.

Thank you Nvidia.

More amazing Maxwell numbers

A card with no cables again beating a GTX470 running Dual 6 pins, this time in Valley.

Amazing progress.

And just 10% slower than a GTX480, the former "King of the Hill"

Pressure said:

Well, a Radeon R7 265 is faster than the Geforce 750 Ti, so why is this impressive?

Obviously it uses less power but it also performs worse.

Maxwell2 aka GM204 (Geforce GTX 970/980) is whats impressive, however.

Click to expand...

Wow, tough crowd.

First off, let me say that I run my central air relentlessly to offset the heat generated by 3 or 4 Mac Pros running all day and night. I drive a V8 car (made in Europe) that gets 9MPG.

So honestly I don't give a flat damn about saving a few pennies/dollars on electricity. The point was that the GPU power that used to take up ALL of the available power plugs in a Mac Pro can now run without using them at all. So, if you had single slot versions of this card you could run 4 of them, for four times the GPGPU power.

Or, you could use a gtx750 for boot screens and run a 980 via the power plugs. (Until we get EFI done)

So, feel free to run off and rain on someone else's parade. Your inability to understand significance of something doesn't change the fact that it is significant.

Here is a good example, read this thread.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1814308/

Your R7 whatever would be of no use to someone needing CUDA. Aside from which, no boot screens on the AMD card.

sebseb said:

I don't work yet, I'm in grad school! Also I never owned a Mac Pro and I'm trying to buy one and I had no idea of EFI stuff until I came to this forum! I really wanted to know what MVC does! if someone asks why a Mac Pro costs 3000$, do you guys act like this ? Tell the guy he is poor, cheap and is paid hourly?? Or do you explain him the features of the device and why it costs that much!

Anyways I simply asked a question and I wanted to get an idea of what process goes on and why it's price tag!

Click to expand...

I have giant folders full of test roms. And notebooks full of scrawled notes, what was changed, what the effect was, etc.

For Kepler cards PCIE 5.0 I have a folder called "Hell" and another called "misery". I almost became single due to my single-minded obsession with night after night testing. And I would always finish in a dark and foul mood.

It takes us WEEKS to find just the right combo of code to make the cards work perfectly.To the people who do a hex compare and say "oh, look, they just changed 20 or 30 bytes, what's the big deal?" consider this, the GTX Titan has a rom that contains around 400,000 bytes. So it isn't like you can go start plugging values in and hit a lucky guess.

We have already got some time in on Maxwell. 750 is nearly done, just have to find the PCIE 2.0 switch. And I mean "just" like "just find the needle in the haystack". With every card family Nvidia has moved it, rather randomly. The cards are literally perfect otherwise, HDMI sports even work which I gather is a problem for the non-flashed ones.

But now in addition to the 2.0 switch we have to add another layer of "protection" due to some greedily eager code kiddies. So there will be a few extra weeks til release.

Some cards, like GTX770 are a never ending source of trouble. They keep changing RAM chips at the build sites. New RAM chips equals new rom. I get a fresh box from Newegg, put the working rom on and I get a screen of gibberish. This has made it very difficult for the illiterate code kiddies. I got an email from the customer of some clowns in NC. They bought a 770 from those guys and it ran like crap. I explained that the only reason that it had our name on the screen was because they had purchased it from clueless hacks who had placed the wrong rom on their card.

In short, we don't just google around until we find a rom. They have to be written. The roms had 1 part a few years ago. Then the EFI got added. Now modern Maxwell roms have no fewer than 5 separate pieces. All have to interlock, hand in glove. Any errors and the whole grinds to a halt.

IN short, it isn't easy.