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Fastest Mac GPUs with full EFI boot screens, etc, GTX570 & GTX580

Asgorath said:
The PC cards work out-of-the-box with Mountain Lion (and 10.7.5 when it ships), and need the 270.00.00f06 driver from NVIDIA for 10.7.4 in order to work.
Click to expand...

Does that mean there is no need to install the drivers for 10.8 ? The GEForce.kext and company that come with a vanilla Mountain Lion are version 8.0.51 whilst those in the Release 270.00.00f06 from the nvidia site are 7.10.2... I thought the drivers were coming from nvidia directly, but am I confused ?
 
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It should be on my doorstep tomorrow ^^ Would Have liked MVC's boot screen mod but it's a bit too pricey from here in Europe.
 
ekwipt said:
MacVidCards what's currently the best Nvidia card working with Avid Media Composer 6 and Mountin Lion?

And then what do you think the best card would be for separately and combined for:

Avid Media Composer
FCPX
Adobe Creative Suite 6

In that order?
Click to expand...

GTX570 2.5 if you don't want to deal with external power, GTX580 3GB if you don't mind bothering with a PSU for card.


Henahn said:
I'm running a EVGA GTX 570 1.2 GB on a MacPro 3,1, in OSX 10.8.
I read this whole thread, so I just plugged it in SLOT 2 and got it working, with no EFI.
Since I have my system on SSD, it's not much a problem because it boots in 15s. But I still have a few questions:

  1. If I use a bootloader like "rEFIT", will I be able to see the boot screen?
Click to expand...

I'm going to give you a hint and you see if you can do some Detective work (like Sherlock Holmes or Columbo) and find your way to the answer.

If you look closely at the word "rEFIT" you will see that they cleverly hid an acronym in there. It describes how the program works and gives you your answer.
 
Just a heads up to future GTX 570 2.5 GB buyers for the Point Of View card (model found mostly in Europe): It's got 4 bloody effing protruding screws under the PCB which means it cannot be mounted into slot 1 of a Mac Pro, and seeing as the cooler is slightly bigger than 2 slots it effectively takes up slots 2,3 and 4 :(

Don't know wether or not to keep it, or return it if I can find an EVGA 2.5 GB model, or a 1.25 worst case.

But as expected, coming from an ATI 5770, performance is stellar in BMD Da Vinci Resolve. Tested with Arri Alexa Prores 4444 footage and it ramps up to 25fps extremely quickly with several nodes applied. Tracking is a blaze as well... very, very impressive. Also of note you don't have to use a GUI graphics card, it works great with just the 570 for my self training set up - obviously if I were billing clients on this machine I would have gone the MacVidCards route with a GTX570+GT120 combo. Definitely will be pushing companies I freelance for to look at upgrading their Mac Pros.

Don't have Adobe CS6, will call a colleague to test with his license this weekend.

FCPX interface feels much faster but it looks like there is no improvement in render times (subjective, nothing measured). OpenCL around the 2X on the LuxMark LuxBall HDR and 3X on the complex room tests. Quick test in Civ 5 shows no better performance, maybe even worse actually, again compared to 5770.
 
initialsBB said:
Just a heads up to future GTX 570 2.5 GB buyers for the Point Of View card (model found mostly in Europe): It's got 4 bloody effing protruding screws under the PCB which means it cannot be mounted into slot 1 of a Mac Pro, and seeing as the cooler is slightly bigger than 2 slots it effectively takes up slots 2,3 and 4 :(
Click to expand...

Lol wtf?
I ordered a EVGA one from MVC and it's fitting perfect into slot one leaving me with slot 3 & 4 free.

I threw out my old GT120 in order to save it in case the GTX570 quits.
Do I have any advantage running both cards?
I have a 24" ACD and a small, old VGA LG 17" flatron screen both on the GTX 570.
 
El Awesome said:
Lol wtf?
I ordered a EVGA one from MVC and it's fitting perfect into slot one leaving me with slot 3 & 4 free.

I threw out my old GT120 in order to save it in case the GTX570 quits.
Do I have any advantage running both cards?
I have a 24" ACD and a small, old VGA LG 17" flatron screen both on the GTX 570.
Click to expand...

The advantage in keeping the GT120 is just so you can do 3+ monitors. (the 570 will only drive 2 at once of its connections)
 
Just another update following my GTX 570 debacle. There are quite a few GTX 500 and 600 cards that have very quiet top 2/3 fan coolers (MSI Twin Frozer comes to mind). I think it turns out to be a relatively bad idea in a Mac Pro because these cards blow hot air out of the card into the space above and not out the back of the machine, which means directly onto either PCIe cards above or onto hard drive bays 3 and 4... these then get very hot with a powerful gfx card / hair dryer underneath. It seems more reasonable to stick to standard coolers which expel air out the PCI bracket.
 
initialsBB said:
Just another update following my GTX 570 debacle. There are quite a few GTX 500 and 600 cards that have very quiet top 2/3 fan coolers (MSI Twin Frozer comes to mind). I think it turns out to be a relatively bad idea in a Mac Pro because these cards blow hot air out of the card into the space above and not out the back of the machine, which means directly onto either PCIe cards above or onto hard drive bays 3 and 4... these then get very hot with a powerful gfx card / hair dryer underneath. It seems more reasonable to stick to standard coolers which expel air out the PCI bracket.
Click to expand...

If I take a look at the original Nvidia GTX570, the coolers are also on the top.
You have the PCIe-fan to cool down all that stuff! No worries there, I got mine under full power while gaming and I checked heat afterwards - no problem.
 
I did a comparison of two identical EVGA GTX 570 2.5gb versions with CUDA-Z. One of the cards had the EFI boot rom modification performed by MacVidCards. The computer was the same, just swapped the card and ran the CUDA-Z test, Xbench and a subjective test playing back a Red 5k timeline in Adobe Premier.

The cards scored identically on everything except for the Memory Copy Device to Host tests, where the flashed card was about twice as fast. I am assuming this is because the flashed card runs at double PCI speed, but I am not an expert at these things.

We tried playing back a premier timeline that was 5K Red footage with effects at various resolutions but both cards "felt" identical, (neither played full res). The flashed card didn't subjectively seem any faster. If anyone has an idea how to stress the cards to show the difference let me know and I will try to redo the test.

The OpenCL fix (libclh.dylib) made everything much slower, even things like finder window redraws so we uninstalled it. To be honest I don't fully understand the OpenCL fix.

CUDA-Z Report Stock Card
=============
Version: 0.6.133 SVN Built Jun 25 2010 23:28:46
http://cuda-z.sourceforge.net/
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.8 12A269
Driver Version: 8.0.51 295.30.00f01
Driver Dll Version: 5.0
Runtime Dll Version: 3.0

Core Information
----------------
Name: GeForce GTX 570
Compute Capability: 2.0
Clock Rate: 1464 MHz
Multiprocessors: 15
Warp Size: 32
Regs Per Block: 32768
Threads Per Block: 1024
Threads Dimensions: 1024 x 1024 x 64
Grid Dimensions: 65535 x 65535 x 65535
Watchdog Enabled: Yes
Integrated GPU: No
Concurrent Kernels: Yes
Compute Mode: Default

Memory Information
------------------
Total Global: 2559.69 MiB
Shared Per Block: 48 KiB
Pitch: 2048 MiB
Total Constant: 64 KiB
Texture Alignment: 512 B
Texture 1D Size: 65536
Texture 2D Size: 65536 x 65535
Texture 3D Size: 2048 x 2048 x 2048
GPU Overlap: Yes
Map Host Memory: Yes
Error Correction: No

Performance Information
-----------------------
Memory Copy
Host Pinned to Device: 2946.53 MiB/s
Host Pageable to Device: 2791.7 MiB/s
Device to Host Pinned: 2958.62 MiB/s
Device to Host Pageable: 2799.05 MiB/s
Device to Device: 59.5438 GiB/s
GPU Core Performance
Single-precision Float: 1392.71 Gflop/s
Double-precision Float: 175.572 Gflop/s
32-bit Integer: 700.618 Giop/s
24-bit Integer: 699.786 Giop/s

Generated: Thu Aug 16 20:09:10 2012


CUDA-Z Report EFI Flashed MacVidCards card
=============
Version: 0.6.133 SVN Built Jun 25 2010 23:28:46
http://cuda-z.sourceforge.net/
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.8 12A269
Driver Version: 8.0.51 295.30.00f01
Driver Dll Version: 5.0
Runtime Dll Version: 3.0

Core Information
----------------
Name: GeForce GTX 570
Compute Capability: 2.0
Clock Rate: 1464 MHz
Multiprocessors: 15
Warp Size: 32
Regs Per Block: 32768
Threads Per Block: 1024
Threads Dimensions: 1024 x 1024 x 64
Grid Dimensions: 65535 x 65535 x 65535
Watchdog Enabled: Yes
Integrated GPU: No
Concurrent Kernels: Yes
Compute Mode: Default

Memory Information
------------------
Total Global: 2559.56 MiB
Shared Per Block: 48 KiB
Pitch: 2048 MiB
Total Constant: 64 KiB
Texture Alignment: 512 B
Texture 1D Size: 65536
Texture 2D Size: 65536 x 65535
Texture 3D Size: 2048 x 2048 x 2048
GPU Overlap: Yes
Map Host Memory: Yes
Error Correction: No

Performance Information
-----------------------
Memory Copy
Host Pinned to Device: 5681.18 MiB/s
Host Pageable to Device: 3533.28 MiB/s
Device to Host Pinned: 5679.95 MiB/s
Device to Host Pageable: 3529.13 MiB/s
Device to Device: 58.8025 GiB/s
GPU Core Performance
Single-precision Float: 1387.29 Gflop/s
Double-precision Float: 175.602 Gflop/s
32-bit Integer: 700.318 Giop/s
24-bit Integer: 699.442 Giop/s

Generated: Thu Aug 16 20:48:01 2012
 
mr.garon said:
The OpenCL fix (libclh.dylib) made everything much slower, even things like finder window redraws so we uninstalled it. To be honest I don't fully understand the OpenCL fix.
Click to expand...

What OpenCL fix is this ? I don't even have this file on my machine... I did the hexedit on /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenCL.framework/Versions/A/OpenCL. Netkas posted about it here (the third fix, for OS X 10.8):
http://netkas.org/?p=1161

I noticed no interface slow downs at all. Many thanks to the amazing Netkas for finding it and sharing.
 
MacVidCards said:
If you look closely at the word "rEFIT" you will see that they cleverly hid an acronym in there. It describes how the program works and gives you your answer.
Click to expand...

I did see it has r-EFI-t as in Re-fit.

What I am curious is if the display can only work after the driver has been loaded by the OS or if rEFIT would get it to be recognized and running before the OS load.

Since I'm running Lion, and rEFIT has been having some troubles with it, I'd like to know if it'd work instead of having to try it all and not know exactly where to problem might be.
 
OpenCl Fixes

initialsBB said:
What OpenCL fix is this ? I don't even have this file on my machine... I did the hexedit on /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenCL.framework/Versions/A/OpenCL. Netkas posted about it here (the third fix, for OS X 10.8):
http://netkas.org/?p=1161

I noticed no interface slow downs at all. Many thanks to the amazing Netkas for finding it and sharing.
Click to expand...

Guys, I apologize for Apple being a PITA.

Basically, there is a 10.7.4 OpenCl fix which is needed by MOST Fermi cards, possibly Kepler too. It is the one that Netkas posted and I clarified and which Ryan W has so kindly done a tutorial for.

The annoying thing is that in the rMBP and 10.8 OS's they have disabled OpenCl more selectively. They just kill it on cards over 2GB. This allows the Quadro 4000 to work, but kills MANY of our more powerful cards. (ie, the GTX570 2.5, the GTX580 3.0) I am sure this is just some big accident.;) Apple would never go all "sour milk" on us and try to artificially limit other options just to make their (limp) ones seem better. ;);)

I was able to quantify the new OpenCl "mistake" and Netkas was able to isolate how it was done and fix it.

http://netkas.org/?p=1161

So, in 10.7.4 you need one fix.

In 10.7.5, rMBP, and 10.8 ML, you need the other fix ONLY IF YOUR CARD HAS MORE THAN 2GB. This should mean that ALL GTX470, GTX480 will work with OpenCl OOTB. GTX570 and GTX580 cards that are 1.3 GB and 1.5 GB should also not need extra fiddling. It is only the super hi pro GTX570 2.5 GB and the GTX580 3.0 GB that require this extra fix.

I am now getting alot of emails where people bugger this fix up. (as I predicted in the Netkas post) It is vitally important that you pay strict attention to detail. One outraged guy wrote me yesterday claiming the fix wasn't working for him. I asked him to upload file somewhere for me to check it out. Instead of GLDriverbundle he was working on GeForce7xxxGlDriverbundle which is of course a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FILE. It is in fact for older 7300GT, 7800GT and Quadro 4500 cards. As they don't support OpenCl ANYWAY, hardly surprising that it wasn't working for him.

Dozens of people have gotten this to work, you just need to take your time, not get frustrated, and do it exactly as explained. If you start getting frustrated, use that energy to write Apple. They take perfectly functioning drivers and right before releasing them to public they Hobble them to make their Ancient 5870 and Quadro 4000 look better.

As a final thing to try, repairing permissions will sometimes require multiple runs to "take". And is almost never a BAD idea anyway. So run it, and go make yourself a cup of coffee.

Don't even worry about what Apple might do for 10.7.5 and 10.8.1 final editions......
 
I have a macvidcards 570 which is going great guns, even better when I reinstalled my original GT120 for the displays and left the 570 for exclusive Cuda.

How imminent are the 6XX series GTX cards to be usable in OSX and Cuda? The GTX is fast but I just want more, and more, and more..........
 
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powervideo said:
I have a macvidcards 570 which is going great guns, even better when I reinstalled my original GT120 for the displays and left the 570 for exclusive Cuda.

How imminent are the 6XX series GTX cards to be usable in OSX and Cuda? The GTX is fast but I just want more, and more, and more..........
Click to expand...

They already are useable, but nvidia changed the architecture and cut CUDA and compute to perform less well than GTX 570/580.
 
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MacVidCards said:
The annoying thing is that in the rMBP and 10.8 OS's they have disabled OpenCl more selectively. They just kill it on cards over 2GB. This allows the Quadro 4000 to work, but kills MANY of our more powerful cards. (ie, the GTX570 2.5, the GTX580 3.0) I am sure this is just some big accident.;) Apple would never go all "sour milk" on us and try to artificially limit other options just to make their (limp) ones seem better. ;);)
Click to expand...

Do you know, if the limit is set to exactly 2048MB?

Ie. could a eVGA GeForce GTX 680 Superclocked (2048 MB) be hit by the same artificial limit?

marker227 said:
I'm sorry if this has been answered already, but I'm looking to get better FPS and graphics in my games on the Windows HD I have in my Mac pro. I currently have a 5870.

Is the general consensus that any GTX580 card will work?
Click to expand...

This has been answered many many many many times in this thread. But since your time is more valuable than mine, here's the gist of it:

A 580 will require an extra PSU. It will work in OS X, but you'll miss the boot screen. Unless you buy it from MacVidCards, then it'll work like a "native" Apple card. Except you still need an extra PSU, and that seems to be some hassle.
 
Just get a GTX 570, no extra power supply needed etc. and nearly as fast as the GTX 580.
 
I've got my GTX 570 (2.5G) in the mail today (Thanks MacVidCards for the fast shipping) and of course, like everyone else, I ran some tests and comparisons.

I have tested FCP, Motion, PS, Maya 2013, Cuda-Z and games. All the results are huge improvements over my previous 8800GT except for Maya. The mental ray render took the same amount of time or even slower than the GT. (I ran the render a few times)

So here's my question: do I need to do setup Maya in any ways to use the full potential of the card or do the mac version can not use it and I'll need to render under BootCamp?
 
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