Nvidia Driver For Mac? Is It Just A Myth?

[highmarcs]

I have one of the MBP's from 2008/09 that has the Nvidia 9400M chipset in it. I have frequent freezing which is only getting worse and I have learned that the freezing on these machines is related to a bug in this chipset.

Supposedly, there was a firmware update/driver release a while back that fixes this, but I can't find it anywhere.

When I go to the Nvidia site, I can't find ANY drivers for Mac. I can only find drivers for Windows, Linux and something called Solaris?

Anyway, does this mystical driver I read about actually exist, and does anyone know where I can find it if it does?

Thanks.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

There are CUDA drivers for the 9400M integrated graphics processor (IGP) here, select the "GeForce 9M Series (Notebooks)" and you can select drivers for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

 

[alphaod]

If it's a bug in the chipset you need to get the motherboard replaced.

Getting drivers won't help. Anyways for your Mac they're provided with the OS and cannot be user installed or upgraded.

 

[Asuriyan]

Drivers for Mac are called kernel extensions or KEXTs and they're packaged with the OS. If you're running the latest Mavericks that's really all you can do.

I have a Mac mini with that GPU and it's been running literally 24/7 for almost 5 years without a single crash. Perhaps your hard drive is failing, or your RAM. Maybe a clean OS install will help. There are so many possible causes that it's silly to fixate on just one.

 

[leman]

Nvidia does sometimes release a custom driver for OS X (they can be found on their website). However, they only support certain limited range of GPUs. It would be nice of course, if Nvidia released drivers more often (and with more functionality/performance enhancements) but if I understand it correctly, they are constrained by Apple's OpenGL implementation stack. Basically, the driver is a plugin for the OpenGL implementation created by Apple - Nvidia/AMD just 'fill in' the hardware-specific functionality. This is also apparently the reason why OpenGL on OS X is generally slower then on Windows, as Apple's implementation is creating more overhead than a custom vendor-written driver.

 

[Macman45]

The CUDA drivers are not going to improve things as they are only used in specific tasks...mostly folding and the like. If you have OSX up to date I'd be looking at a hardware issue. If the GPU has issues then as posted above it's going to need a new LB