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

[EdDuPlessis]

In TaT there is no page 7 ??? ;-)

Lol...maybe I'm seein the iPad version of the site and it's different for me?

 

[m4v3r1ck]

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

Lol...maybe I'm seein the iPad version of the site and it's different for me?

Sorry, my bad and you're right! Safari on iPad is ok!

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/20309797/

Since last update TaT it's acting drunk!

Cheers ;-)

EDIT: changed postcount

 

[EdDuPlessis]

Sorry, my bad and you're right! Safari on iPad is ok!

Since last update TaT it's acting drunk!

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/20309792/

Cheers ;-)

Don't forget I'm referring to his next post in particular look at the max FPS on all the benchmark results.

On the upside, even without official support the nine series has much better Open CL performance than the seven series.

 

[Asgorath]

Forum member DMThomas made the most well known example on this forum at the link below. The performance of the GTX 670 between both operating systems was just a few frames per second. Yes the API was different but it didn't make much difference in the benchmark with the GeForce 670. Switching to the GTX 970 was a whole other story. Windows was much faster.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1782921/

The OpenGL version of Unigine Heaven is slower than the DirectX one, even under Windows. A fair comparison would be the OpenGL version on both OSes.

Having said that:

GTX 680 is 21.7 to 24.1 FPS (-10%) and GTX 980 is 29.6 to 34.1 (-13.2%) without tessellation.

GTX 680 is 17.1 to 19.8 FPS (-13.7%) and GTX 980 is 27.2 to 32.2 (-15.5%) with tessellation.

I wouldn't call the deltas earth-shatteringly different between Kepler and Maxwell. Being 10 to 15% behind Windows is about as good as it gets under OS X, in general. Yes, the Maxwell GPU has a slightly bigger delta, but we're not talking a massive difference and thus I question your assertion that the Maxwell drivers aren't "native".

 

[EdDuPlessis]

I wouldn't call the deltas earth-shatteringly different between Kepler and Maxwell. Being 10 to 15% behind Windows is about as good as it gets under OS X, in general. Yes, the Maxwell GPU has a slightly bigger delta, but we're not talking a massive difference and thus I question your assertion that the Maxwell drivers aren't "native".

I only noted that the delta is greater for Maxwell, especially the max FPS on Unigene Heaven being very noticeable (16fps difference). That wasn't the case with Kepler (4fps difference)

If I was home right now I would be happy to do the benchmarks myself but I am abroad with just an iPad for two weeks. Who else can run an accurate test here?

 

[Asgorath]

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the DirectX team at NVIDIA has spent a lot more time/effort tuning the driver since it's a flagship product with full support and all that. However, when you said it wasn't a native driver under OS X, it sounded like you were suggesting there was basically no acceleration at all. The NVIDIA Mac team might squeeze out a couple more percent if it was in fact an official product under that OS, but those numbers suggest performance in GPU-limited cases is already very good and around the ballpark of what you'd expect compared with Windows. If it was 30-50% slower, then yes I would agree that the Maxwell driver under OS X had issues. However, given the fact it's not officially supported, I'm quite happy with the performance of my GTX 980 under OS X.

 

[flowrider]

When I updated the Web Driver (343.02.01) The Cuda PP bug reappeared (Update Required).

Lou

 

[EdDuPlessis]

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the DirectX team at NVIDIA has spent a lot more time/effort tuning the driver since it's a flagship product with full support and all that. However, when you said it wasn't a native driver under OS X, it sounded like you were suggesting there was basically no acceleration at all. The NVIDIA Mac team might squeeze out a couple more percent if it was in fact an official product under that OS, but those numbers suggest performance in GPU-limited cases is already very good and around the ballpark of what you'd expect compared with Windows. If it was 30-50% slower, then yes I would agree that the Maxwell driver under OS X had issues. However, given the fact it's not officially supported, I'm quite happy with the performance of my GTX 980 under OS X.

The universal nature of driver packages means you will get close, but not quite the optimal, performance out of your card. The lack of full nine series support is more evident in feature set loss than in performance. We can see that in the CUDA bugs and the communication with all the display ports, and then we have OS X getting in the way of refresh rates at 4K but I haven't been able to confirm that yet. I only use the top most Display Port at 1920x1200

 

[Asgorath]

The universal nature of driver packages means you will get close, but not quite the optimal, performance out of your card. The lack of full nine series support is more evident in feature set loss than in performance. We can see that in the CUDA bugs and the communication with all the display ports, and then we have OS X getting in the way of refresh rates at 4K but I haven't been able to confirm that yet. I only use the top most Display Port at 1920x1200

The latest web driver enables all display ports, so NVIDIA has fixed this already. I don't have a 4K display so I don't have any experience with issues on that side, but again OS X is in much more control over that and I suspect there's very little the drivers can do (e.g. no control panel to set modes, like you have under Windows).

 

[V31]

Hi there,
I feel little bit lost in hardware overall, especially in selecting new GPU as I'm more visual designer than tech-guy. I'm trying to tune up my new-old mac pro (early 2008 - double 2.8 quad core xeon, 22 gb ram, 256 gb ssd, running on 10.10.x) for best performance in Adobe CC 2014 (mainly Photoshop) and Cinema4D.

Current GPU is factory installed ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB. I'm looking for new one to balance system performance for any reasonable price - let's say sky is the limit, but no overkill. I don't play games, I don't have 4K display.

Is it possible to recommend new Nvidia GTX? Thank you & merry xmas.

 

[EdDuPlessis]

Hi there,

Is it possible to recommend new Nvidia GTX? Thank you & merry xmas.

Sounds like GTX 970 is right for you.

 

[romanboy]

Is it possible to recommend new Nvidia GTX? Thank you & merry xmas.

Yup, Nvidia GTX 970. Low power, stellar performance. Get the latest web driver and fire away.

 

[thornslack]

Hello All,

I recently sold my flashed gtx 680 in favor of a cheap gtx 780 I was able to acquire. I was aware that the lack of bootscreens would be a minor issue, but I'm bumping into some problems and was hoping someone might have some insight that I appear to be missing.

My mac pro is 4,1 flashed to 5,1 and I have the gtx 780 installed in the lowest x16 slot and it is powered externally. My boot volume is a software raid 0 of two ssd's on the backplane with OS X Yosemite. OS X boots fine and once login appears I have screens and seemingly full functionality. I ran valley and heaven on the card to make sure things were in order, and then went to boot into my win 7 bootcamp volume.

The bootcamp is an ssd mounted on an apricorn velocity x2 in the second x4 PCIE slot, and historically I would option boot into windows. The windows has fairly up to date nvidia drivers as it was running the gtx 680. However for the life of me I cannot boot into windows with the 780. My assumption was that I could still option boot and select the windows volume with the arrow keys and enter button even if the screen is black. No avail. I downloaded bootchamp but it also black screens. I've pram reset. I've ensured that OS X is selected in the startup disk pane and I've done shut downs from OS X and then powered on and attempted to option boot windows.

What's going on here? I don't have another 2.5 sled to mount the bootcamp volume on the backplane, but I don't see why that should be necessary. Any constructive advice would be much appreciated! Thanks, happy holidays!

EDIT: So when option booting and attempting to select the bootcamp volume by blind chance, the mac pro freezes. Pressing the power button again immediately shuts the mac off. But when I use BootChamp, then my backlit keyboard flickers like usual as the apricorn EFI boots up. Additionally, pressing the power button in this instance does not shut the mac down, so windows is doing something unusual that I cannot see but has not yet reached the log in screen. Is it possible I need a different graphics driver? Could the graphics card be reporting insufficient power? Its currently powered with two 8-pin plugs from my 5.25" 450W supply and it clearly works fine in OS X. Any thoughts on using Parallels to import my bootcamp volume and booting it up under OS X to try and see whats going on? Arg

 

[EdDuPlessis]

I've ensured that OS X is selected in the startup disk pane and I've done shut downs from OS X and then powered on and attempted to option boot windows.

You should choose the boot camp volume in start up disk pane and then hit restart.

What's going on here? I don't have another 2.5 sled to mount the bootcamp volume on the backplane, but I don't see why that should be necessary.

Good, because bays 3 and 4 are supposedly disabled in Bootcamp.

So when option booting and attempting to select the bootcamp volume by blind chance, the mac pro freezes. Pressing the power button again immediately shuts the mac off. But when I use BootChamp, then my backlit keyboard flickers like usual as the apricorn EFI boots up. Additionally, pressing the power button in this instance does not shut the mac down, so windows is doing something unusual that I cannot see but has not yet reached the log in screen. Is it possible I need a different graphics driver?

It is always advisable to keep a cheap back to basics card such as a GT120 or Radeon 56xx to fall back on just in case you need to problem shoot. If you had a basic card you would be able to check if your Windows install is corrupted or if it is indeed the graphics card causing a problem.

Could the graphics card be reporting insufficient power? Its currently powered with two 8-pin plugs from my 5.25" 450W supply and it clearly works fine in OS X.

You're getting enough power unless the supply has a problem starting up before Windows attempts to boot. The GTX 780 and 780Ti normally have an 8 pin and 6 pin so the problem may indeed be related to a power management issue with your dual 8 pin connection, if Windows isn't corrupted. You won't be able to check without a basic card to fall back on.

 

[thornslack]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately the Apricorn sled, while bootable, does not appear as an option under the start up disc section. Only under option boot does the selection become available, despite the presence of an ejectable bootcamp volume in finder. And of course I sold my GT120 ages ago. Arg, back to trolling for used EFI cards

 

[EdDuPlessis]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately the Apricorn sled, while bootable, does not appear as an option under the start up disc section. Only under option boot does the selection become available, despite the presence of an ejectable bootcamp volume in finder. And of course I sold my GT120 ages ago. Arg, back to trolling for used EFI cards

Oh dear that's probably a problem. I would suggest putting the OSX volume in the Apricot and then move just the Windows volume in the first SATA bay to see if anything changes. But because of that RAID I'm not sure if it is safe to move the two disks from one place to another, even if you had two SATA connectors on a PCIE card.

 

[thornslack]

Because it's a software RAID they're easily moved. But I don't have a second slot for them on the Apricorn. I could remove the OS X volume completely and mount the bootcamp on the backplane. But I think its a windows screen I can't see rather than a lack of selectivity. Thanks again, I'll post back if I figure things out.

 

[MacVidCards]

We can flash the 780 for you if you give up.

 

[pixxelpusher]

Video Card for 2006 Mac Pro

Hi, I'm looking to up the GPU performance in my 2006 Mac Pro by upgrading the video card and am wondering is there a limit on where gains can be seen?

What I'm basically trying to work out, is it worth spending the money on a top end card for this Mac (like a GTX 980), or would I be wasting my money and a 7xx or 6xx series card be better.

I've been looking at lots of benchmarks but it's difficult to work out if I will be limited by the 2006 hardware? I'll be using it primarily for gaming under Windows 7.

Thanks for any advice on selecting a card.

 

[EdDuPlessis]

Hi, I'm looking to up the GPU performance in my 2006 Mac Pro by upgrading the video card and am wondering is there a limit on where gains can be seen?

Just get the same GTX 970 we normally recommend for good value performance. You will probably get about 10fps less than that those with a more modern spec but that will still be very good for everything you want to do (example, latest games running 1080p max settings at over 40fps), unless you are either a professional gamer or need almost real time CUDA renders.

 

[m13]

Thanks everyone for all the great info.

Mac Pro 3,1 on 10.8.4 (or could be 10.8.5). Recently my machine froze. After reseting, I was greeting with the following boot screen,

I tried to remote view thru Screens from iPad and get the same graphical corruption.

I am assuming my stock ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT video card is fried. (Way) too late for the recall as well. http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203420

Assuming the fix is a new video card, I am interested in a low power card that will drive 2560x1600 displays x2 via DVI (or DP). I mainly use remote desktop, surf web, play videos, and occasional run Parallels. I am choosing between GT 640, GTX 650, or GT 740 (GDDR5). They are all Kepler GK107. GT 640 is slow with DDR3 but I won't need a power cable. The bigger question is whether any of these PC cards will boot without pre-installing Nvidia web driver. Too hard to see to install any drivers with the current set up.

I thought about upgrading to Yosemite and get GTX 750 or 750 Ti. But the thought of turning off kext signing verification to run TRIM Enabler makes it less attractive. Plus I remember reading that support for GTX 750 is not perfect yet.

Q:
1. Does it look like a new video card would fix this?
2. Can I assume stock 10.8.4 will boot with GT 640 or GTX 650 before installing Nvidia web driver?
3. Anyone can confirm GT 740 works in Mountain Lion?

I appreciate any input I can get.

 

[flowrider]

^^^^It does appear your video card is gone.

The Kext Signing issue with Trim Enabler only affects Yosemite. Mavericks and ML and not affected and no precautions are needed to run Trim Enabler.

As far as Video Cards are concerned, I have a MVC modified GTX570 that has been sitting around in a box for quite some time. When I pulled it, it worked perfectly. It was used on a 3,1 then a 5,1 Mac Pro.

Lou

 

[pixxelpusher]

Just get the same GTX 970 we normally recommend for good value performance. You will probably get about 10fps less than that those with a more modern spec but that will still be very good for everything you want to do (example, latest games running 1080p max settings at over 40fps), unless you are either a professional gamer or need almost real time CUDA renders.

Thanks for the reply. I've been looking at that and a few other cards. I'm just a casual gamer so was wondering would a GTX 670/680 be an ok alternative to the 970? They're about a quarter the price on ebay! (good for my wallet). I'd be upgrading from a Mac HD5870, and have done all the usual upgrades to max out my system (2xQuad Core 3GHz, 32GB Ram, SSD).

Trying to weigh up: Performance / Power Draw / Price.

 

[m13]

^^^^It does appear your video card is gone.

You were correct.

The Kext Signing issue with Trim Enabler only affects Yosemite. Mavericks and ML and not affected and no precautions are needed to run Trim Enabler.

That is one of the two reasons I am hesitant to install GTX 750 or GTX 750 Ti as these Maxwell cards will require me to upgrade to Yosemite and therefore deal with kext signing.

As far as Video Cards are concerned, I have a MVC modified GTX570 that has been sitting around in a box for quite some time. When I pulled it, it worked perfectly. It was used on a 3,1 then a 5,1 Mac Pro.

I bought an EVGA GT 640 and it was able to drive dual 2560x1600 displays before installing Nvidia web driver. The graphics corruption was fixed. I have not spend any time to test sleep and wake but so far so good.

Now I just have to decide if I should consider getting a 6 pin cable and go up to GTX 650 vs GT 740 or install Yosemite and get GTX 750 vs 750 Ti. Anyone else went through the same decision tree?

 

[rcstek]

GTX 570 vs Quadro 4000

I thought that I would share some benchmarks I have a GTX 570 that i've been using for a few years and I thought it was having some problems so I bought a used Quadro 4000. But the problem seems to be an adobe issue so my GTX570 is good. I used unique heaven and luxmark and cuda z, here are the results. Sorry its a lot to look thru but I'm going back to my GTX570
Anyone have any suggestions what card to buy if I want to get a new one

LUXMARK

GTX 570 1310720 kB 1464 MHz
GPU ONLY
Room 460
Ball 992
Sky 3444
HDR 6250

Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0
FPS:33.6
Score:845
Min FPS:7.5
Max FPS:67.9
System
Platform:
Darwin 12.5.0 x86_64
CPU model:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz (2260MHz) x16
GPU model:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (1279MB) x1
Settings
Render:
OpenGL
Mode:
1920x1200 fullscreen
Preset
Custom
Quality
High
Tessellation:
Disabled


Unigine Valley Benchmark 1.0
FPS:33.5
Score:1404
Min FPS:5.1
Max FPS:54.3
GPU model:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (1279MB) x1
Settings
Render:
OpenGL
Mode:
1920x1200 fullscreen
Preset
Custom
Quality
High


Quadro 4000 2097152 kB 950 MHz
GPU ONLY
Room 176
Ball 376
Sky 1424
HDR 2393

Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0
FPS:12.4
Score:313
Min FPS:5.4
Max FPS:22.9
GPU model:
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 (2048MB) x1
Settings
Render:
OpenGL
Mode:
1920x1200 fullscreen
Preset
Custom
Quality
High
Tessellation:
Disabled

Unigine Valley Benchmark 1.0
FPS:12.6
Score:529
Min FPS:9.1
Max FPS:20.0
GPU model:
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 (2048MB) x1
Settings
Render:
OpenGL
Mode:
1920x1200 fullscreen
Preset
Custom
Quality
High

Cuda Z
CUDA-Z Report
=============
Version: 0.9.231 http://cuda-z.sf.net/
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.8.5 12F45
Driver Version: 8.16.80 310.40.00.20f04
Driver Dll Version: 6.50
Runtime Dll Version: 6.0

Core Information
----------------
Name: GeForce GTX 570
Compute Capability: 2.0
Clock Rate: 1464 MHz
PCI Location: 0:8:0
Multiprocessors: 15 (480 Cores)
Therds Per Multiproc.: 1536
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
Stream Priorities: No

Memory Information
------------------
Total Global: 1279.69 MiB
Bus Width: 320 bits
Clock Rate: 1900 MHz
Error Correction: No
L2 Cache Size: 48 KiB
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
Unified Addressing: Yes
Async Engine: Yes, Unidirectional

Performance Information
-----------------------
Memory Copy
Host Pinned to Device: 5543.49 MiB/s
Host Pageable to Device: 2768.73 MiB/s
Device to Host Pinned: 6170.75 MiB/s
Device to Host Pageable: 2952.08 MiB/s
Device to Device: 60.846 GiB/s
GPU Core Performance
Single-precision Float: 1396.14 Gflop/s
Double-precision Float: 175.643 Gflop/s
32-bit Integer: 701.619 Giop/s
24-bit Integer: 680.349 Giop/s

Generated: Mon Dec 29 09:37:43 2014

CUDA-Z Report
=============
Version: 0.9.231 http://cuda-z.sourceforge.net/
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.8.5 12F45
Driver Version: 8.16.80 310.40.00.20f04
Driver Dll Version: 6.50
Runtime Dll Version: 6.0

Core Information
----------------
Name: Quadro 4000
Compute Capability: 2.0
Clock Rate: 950 MHz
PCI Location: 0:8:0
Multiprocessors: 8 (256 Cores)
Therds Per Multiproc.: 1536
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
Stream Priorities: No

Memory Information
------------------
Total Global: 2047.56 MiB
Bus Width: 256 bits
Clock Rate: 1404 MHz
Error Correction: No
L2 Cache Size: 48 KiB
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
Unified Addressing: Yes
Async Engine: Yes, Bidirectional

Performance Information
-----------------------
Memory Copy
Host Pinned to Device: 5678.76 MiB/s
Host Pageable to Device: 3223.86 MiB/s
Device to Host Pinned: 6157.13 MiB/s
Device to Host Pageable: 3257.72 MiB/s
Device to Device: 34.0352 GiB/s
GPU Core Performance
Single-precision Float: 480.462 Gflop/s
Double-precision Float: 172.594 Gflop/s
32-bit Integer: 242.739 Giop/s
24-bit Integer: 232.716 Giop/s

Generated: Mon Dec 29 10:45:27 2014