nVidia GTX 1080

[Squuiid]

I'm heading to the US for a week and want to pre-order a card (huge savings vs UK pricing), but won't have time to wait for anyone to test it first. I will be using it on second cMP dedicated to Windows 10.

Well, given these UK prices I'm REAAAAALLY hoping MacVidCards has worked his magic on the 1080 by July 4th when I visit.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/news...-1080-founders-edition-graphics-cards-99.html

 

[MacVidCards]

Last full AMD driver for cMP is for cards intro'd in 2011.

If Nvidia gave same poor support cMP would have twilighted with GTX680 / K5000. How many would still be here swearing by these machines if that represented "top end"?

The fact that Apple has left OpenGL in dark ages isn't Nvidia's fault. The fact that GPGPU CUDA/OpenCl has allowed newer cards to keep these machines nearly current in TV Film biz is only reason they aren't selling for $25 on CL .

I have a few hundred data points on this. DaVinci resolve can't run 4K on a 680 with 2Gb. Runs infinitely better on Titan-X with 12 Gb.

If Nvidia hadn't kept writing drivers Apple would have gotten their way, the 6,1 WOULD have been faster in almost every way than 5,1. But thank goidness that isn't the case.

Not sure what the advantage is in tearing down one of last groups keeping Mac viable.

 

[thornslack]

I don't think anyone is tearing them down. It's just impossible not to notice the growing trend of issues and lackluster performance. Dollars spent aren't going as far anymore, and as much as I'd love an EFI supported card, there's no sense to me in investing any more in my old cMP. Hopefully I can run it until cannonlake or icelake appears and I can build a more modern and outrageously overpowered rig.

 

[mtasquared]

I respect your opinion, however, if your CPU usage stuck at around 17%, that may means you are CPU limiting, that's because the game can only utilise 2 threads.

On very worst case, the game can only utilise 1 thread, that's, 8.3% on the W3680. And there may be some other background demand from the OS itself, overall CPU usage may be just 10%, however, that's a sign that you may be CPU limiting.

Thanks for your thoughtful post! When playing Witcher 3 in Bootcamp my fps with a GTX 760 varies from 18 fps at 1920x1080 to 30 fps at 1024x768 with most settings at ultra. This is a 66% increase. CPU utilization moved from about 12 to 15%. Less dramatic is changing texture setting from high to low at 1080p with a only a 15% increase in fps, and no change in cpu utilization. From this and what I read in your post I conclude that my cpu may be close to its maximum in utilization at 1080p (which is where I game on a 44" screen anyway). That said, I still feel that a GTX 1080 would benefit me more than a used gtx 980. At current resolution the cpu would be taxed near the limit, but the 1080 would do more on its end too. And then the CUDA power could come in handy on the Mac side. We'll see.

 

[AidenShaw]

Last full AMD driver for cMP is for cards intro'd in 2011.

If Nvidia gave same poor support cMP would have twilighted with GTX680 / K5000. How many would still be here swearing by these machines if that represented "top end"?

The fact that Apple has left OpenGL in dark ages isn't Nvidia's fault. The fact that GPGPU CUDA/OpenCl has allowed newer cards to keep these machines nearly current in TV Film biz is only reason they aren't selling for $25 on CL .

I have a few hundred data points on this. DaVinci resolve can't run 4K on a 680 with 2Gb. Runs infinitely better on Titan-X with 12 Gb.

If Nvidia hadn't kept writing drivers Apple would have gotten their way, the 6,1 WOULD have been faster in almost every way than 5,1. But thank goidness that isn't the case.

Not sure what the advantage is in tearing down one of last groups keeping Mac viable.

MVC - if you want to shift from dying markets to growth markets - develop a service to help real professionals move from closed cMP/nMP workflows to open systems (Windows/Linux) on commodity high performance/lower priced systems.

No tube-based update at WWDC (didn't say MWSF'16 ) is going to make anyone believe that Apple cares about anything more than the cat/wedding video FCPX market with the nMP.

 

[mtasquared]

MVC - if you want to shift from dying markets to growth markets - develop a service to help real professionals move from closed cMP/nMP workflows to open systems (Windows/Linux) on commodity high performance/lower priced systems.

No tube-based update at WWDC (didn't say MWSF'16 ) is going to make anyone believe that Apple cares about anything more than the cat/wedding video FCPX market with the nMP.

If I'm going to jump off the Apple ship its because the operating system has gone down the crapper. I am still on 10.8 and loving it and there's no way I'm going to use Windows or Linux for my main system. Small time creatives embraced Apple and I hope they continue to serve us. Big Data of course should use Linux or Windows.

 

[DPUser]

If I'm going to jump off the Apple ship its because the operating system has gone down the crapper. I am still on 10.8 and loving it and there's no way I'm going to use Windows or Linux for my main system. Small time creatives embraced Apple and I hope they continue to serve us. Big Data of course should use Linux or Windows.

I run El Cap on my home Macs but, like mta, am still running ML in my recording studio because it is just too solid to abandon. I've found the cMP upgrade path very gratifying and suiting my needs perfectly. Until we experience a quantum shift in the way audio is produced, I see no need to jump ship, but I might add a slave PC running VE Pro if my work demands it.

Kudos to Nvidia for keeping the cMP viable for video. Here's hoping for 1080 Mac drivers!

 

[antonis]

MVC - if you want to shift from dying markets to growth markets - develop a service to help real professionals move from closed cMP/nMP workflows to open systems (Windows/Linux) on commodity high performance/lower priced systems.

No tube-based update at WWDC (didn't say MWSF'16 ) is going to make anyone believe that Apple cares about anything more than the cat/wedding video FCPX market with the nMP.

That is a seriously good advice. OpenGL is just finished on OS X. The iOS API is the boss now.

I keep no hope for apple, anymore, regarding this market. Heck, even the thought of an upcoming (?) update of MBP that actually has me interested as a potential upgrade, gets me shivering... How many ports are we going to lose this time ? How many "pro" models are they going to release with integrated-only gpus ?

 

[JoeG4]

I keep no hope for apple, anymore, regarding this market. Heck, even the thought of an upcoming (?) update of MBP that actually has me interested as a potential upgrade, gets me shivering... How many ports are we going to lose this time ? How many "pro" models are they going to release with integrated-only gpus ?

I wonder if what happened before was the core team were still hardcore nerds and demanded their big, powerful machines. The kinda stuff that we know and love.

Do we really need to justify the desire for a big machine with a super video card in it? I used to think the beauty in using OS X, was you could do some oldschool unix hacking, run some linux-style services, AND have your Adobe cake. Oh, and maybe fire up a few Steam games at the end of the day to unwind.

Macs could do it all. Now they're trying to say an iPad can do it all. Sure, it can. If you lower your expectations. Dangit, I want crysis 2, 90fps, on a 4k desktop monitor WITH OTHER STUFF RUNNING IN THE BACKGROUND FOR ***** N GIGGLES.

I don't mind having a big powerful tower for it. And I don't want to pay my ISP for bandwidth, or some cloud company to mismanage my data/services and then get hacked and leave it all vulnerable.

 

[pastrychef]

Here are Fl0r!an's Heaven results that he posted on the hackintosh thread.

To me, it really shows how our aging Mac Pros have become big bottlenecks for high end video cards. It is also another reason I'm heavily leaning towards putting together a hackintosh when it comes time to retire my Mac Pro. I don't think a Mac Pro can come close to this even with a GTX 1080.

 

[Asgorath]

Percentages can be deceiving compared to looking at the real frame rates.

One of your benchmarks was identical between both cards with no significant difference outside margin of error.

And when you use red fonts, exclamation marks and personal attacks you have lost me completely.

Nvidia said themselves, only beta support arrived for Maxwell last August. No need since then, no official Maxwell vendors, nothing in the support documents about Maxwell.

Now I can understand why people report driver bugs below on other forums. This forum is often hostile, often unhelpful and people with questions are often pushed into purchasing expensive upgrades that are not well supported.

https://forums.geforce.com/default/...970-webdriver-346-03-05f01-under-osx-10-11-3/
https://forums.geforce.com/default/...hop-2015-1-2-with-osx-webdriver-346-03-05f01/
https://feedback.photoshop.com/phot...sh-on-a-mask-and-sometimes-with-healing-brush
https://feedback.photoshop.com/phot...p-2015-1-2-artifacts-appears-when-using-brush
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7437317?start=0&tstart=0
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2094893

Here's the text from NVIDIA's web driver page:

BETA support is for iMac 14,2 / 14,3 (2013), iMac 13,1 / 13,2 (2012) and MacBook Pro 11,3 (2013), MacBook Pro 10,1 (2012), and MacBook Pro 9,1 (2012) users.

Perhaps you're talking about the blog post?

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/08/31/mac-driver/

In the past, they haven't said a word about the fact PC cards have been running with their drivers, and yet countless people have had great experiences running them under OS X.

I'm curious -- what do you want NVIDIA to do exactly? They're already going out of their way to make these cards work under OS X. There are no official products from EVGA etc, since the cMP is pretty much a dead market, so NVIDIA has done what they can to enable people via the web drivers. Do you want them to enable all the fancy new hardware features that Maxwell and Pascal have? How are they supposed to do that, exactly? On Windows, they can just expose new OpenGL extensions for whatever they want, but that obviously doesn't apply to OS X.

It looks like there was a Photoshop bug introduced in 10.11.3 (346.03.05f01). I've seen reports that this is fixed in 10.11.5 (346.03.10f10). Sometimes bugs slip through, and NVIDIA has generally been pretty good about fixing them in a relatively timely manner. What more do you want here? Obviously it'd be better if there were never any bugs ever, but I think that's a somewhat unreasonable expectation.

I really don't understand how you're coming to your conclusions regarding Maxwell and compatibility mode or color compression being disabled, so if you have more evidence, I'd really appreciate learning more about it. As I've said, all the results and my own personal testing suggests that most of these games people are running are simply CPU limited, especially on older cMP systems. My TITAN X is running superbly well for the games I play, and has been a major upgrade over my old 680.

 

[benjaprud]

About CPU throttling, i'll agree with some that the high-end westmere parts are still up to the task, at least under windows. With the Titan X I get framerates almost identical to the ones published in GPU reviews, which are made on PCs equipped with the latest CPUs. You'll lose 3 fps there because of the CPU and one there because of the PCIe (and gain one back thanks to better memory bandwidth), but you get about 90-95% of the performance of a 2016 PC in most games, at least in 4K and I guess also in 1440p. Now in 1080p you might be CPU throttled so it's not the way to go if you're into 144fps gaming. There's still one game here or there that relies more heavily on the CPU where you'll see a performance gap though, but these are rarely fast paced/gorgeous graphics games so that's mostly OK. Most people don't have a 6700K and game developers tend to target the mid-performance tier in which our MPs are still competitive for now.

When it comes to OSX, I don't even see the point of talking about hardware performance in games. The framerate of any game is held back by the fact that every single piece of software involved in rendering the game (OS, driver, game) is poorly optimised, if at all, especially on recent nVidia GPUs. I gave up gaming on OSX a few years ago and now I don't get why would anyone serious about gaming want to play on OSX, let alone buy the latest high-end GPU to improve gaming performance on OSX when it's so easy to setup a windows partition. On windows, you benefit from decades of efforts tuning the software for gaming performance at every level for every hardware combination (well except for bad console ports, which is why some people hate consoles), which you won't ever have on OSX. OSX is OK for casual gaming, but casual gamers don't buy 1080s.

I'm looking forward to see some of you enjoy the 1080 in your MPs, I really hope NVidia will support these in their driver. I'll pass on this one though as I've lost too much money on the TX (which is still great by the way).

 

[flowrider]

And there's folks postulating that there's more to come:

http://techreport.com/news/30174/rumor-a-gp102-geforce-titan-and-gtx-1080-ti-are-in-the-works

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-1080-ti-pascal-gp102/

Lou

 

[Squuiid]

About CPU throttling, i'll agree with some that the high-end westmere parts are still up to the task, at least under windows. With the Titan X I get framerates almost identical to the ones published in GPU reviews, which are made on PCs equipped with the latest CPUs. You'll lose 3 fps there because of the CPU and one there because of the PCIe (and gain one back thanks to better memory bandwidth), but you get about 90-95% of the performance of a 2016 PC in most games, at least in 4K and I guess also in 1440p. Now in 1080p you might be CPU throttled so it's not the way to go if you're into 144fps gaming. There's still one game here or there that relies more heavily on the CPU where you'll see a performance gap though, but these are rarely fast paced/gorgeous graphics games so that's mostly OK. Most people don't have a 6700K and game developers tend to target the mid-performance tier in which our MPs are still competitive for now.

When it comes to OSX, I don't even see the point of talking about hardware performance in games. The framerate of any game is held back by the fact that every single piece of software involved in rendering the game (OS, driver, game) is poorly optimised, if at all, especially on recent nVidia GPUs. I gave up gaming on OSX a few years ago and now I don't get why would anyone serious about gaming want to play on OSX, let alone buy the latest high-end GPU to improve gaming performance on OSX when it's so easy to setup a windows partition. On windows, you benefit from decades of efforts tuning the software for gaming performance at every level for every hardware combination (well except for bad console ports, which is why some people hate consoles), which you won't ever have on OSX. OSX is OK for casual gaming, but casual gamers don't buy 1080s.

I'm looking forward to see some of you enjoy the 1080 in your MPs, I really hope NVidia will support these in their driver. I'll pass on this one though as I've lost too much money on the TX (which is still great by the way).

+1. VERY well put.

 

[Draeconis]

Here are Fl0r!an's Heaven results that he posted on the hackintosh thread.

View attachment 632546

To me, it really shows how our aging Mac Pros have become big bottlenecks for high end video cards. It is also another reason I'm heavily leaning towards putting together a hackintosh when it comes time to retire my Mac Pro. I don't think a Mac Pro can come close to this even with a GTX 1080.

Was all ready to post my results from an identical test.. but the numbers aren't so great.

FPS 39.7
Score: 999

Min FPS: 7.6
Max FPS: 99.2

10.11.5, Intel Xeon W3670, EVGA GeForce 680 Mac Edition

OpenGL, 1920x1080 fullscreen
Quality: Ultra
Tessellation: Extreme

 

[Asgorath]

Was all ready to post my results from an identical test.. but the numbers aren't so great.

FPS 39.7
Score: 999

Min FPS: 7.6
Max FPS: 99.2

10.11.5, Intel Xeon W3670, EVGA GeForce 680 Mac Edition

OpenGL, 1920x1080 fullscreen
Quality: Ultra
Tessellation: Extreme

I guess this is where SCSC comes in and says this proves the Maxwell driver is running in compatibility mode with no color compression, right?

 

[pat500000]

About CPU throttling, i'll agree with some that the high-end westmere parts are still up to the task, at least under windows. With the Titan X I get framerates almost identical to the ones published in GPU reviews, which are made on PCs equipped with the latest CPUs. You'll lose 3 fps there because of the CPU and one there because of the PCIe (and gain one back thanks to better memory bandwidth), but you get about 90-95% of the performance of a 2016 PC in most games, at least in 4K and I guess also in 1440p. Now in 1080p you might be CPU throttled so it's not the way to go if you're into 144fps gaming. There's still one game here or there that relies more heavily on the CPU where you'll see a performance gap though, but these are rarely fast paced/gorgeous graphics games so that's mostly OK. Most people don't have a 6700K and game developers tend to target the mid-performance tier in which our MPs are still competitive for now.

When it comes to OSX, I don't even see the point of talking about hardware performance in games. The framerate of any game is held back by the fact that every single piece of software involved in rendering the game (OS, driver, game) is poorly optimised, if at all, especially on recent nVidia GPUs. I gave up gaming on OSX a few years ago and now I don't get why would anyone serious about gaming want to play on OSX, let alone buy the latest high-end GPU to improve gaming performance on OSX when it's so easy to setup a windows partition. On windows, you benefit from decades of efforts tuning the software for gaming performance at every level for every hardware combination (well except for bad console ports, which is why some people hate consoles), which you won't ever have on OSX. OSX is OK for casual gaming, but casual gamers don't buy 1080s.

I'm looking forward to see some of you enjoy the 1080 in your MPs, I really hope NVidia will support these in their driver. I'll pass on this one though as I've lost too much money on the TX (which is still great by the way).

True. If I was to game...i'll go to my consoles; however, there are emulators to game with osx..and some retro games for osx. I have cMP 2010 to edit videos. It would be an extra perk if they modified to make it gaming platform...otherwise...it's just for work.

 

[DearthnVader]

As stated by Nvidia and others, web drivers don't have yet have Maxwell optimisation let alone Pascal and there are serious bugs creeping into the last few builds (OpenCL crashes, visual bugs, video editing slow downs).

I don't know why Nvidia isn't fixing these bugs because they should be trivial repairs if they didn't exist earlier in the year.

There is also an issue with Mac EFI flashed cards (confirmed on my 680) no longer functioning properly in Windows when you launch professional apps such as Photoshop or 3D modelling apps. The GPU remains in low clock speed state and that means the apps are extremely slow. The only solution currently is to disable GPU acceleration in the app or remove the Mac EFI from the card.

That is also a recent bug that wasn't there earlier in the year. It doesn't affect full screen apps like gaming. One could theorise that Nvidia has botched the OS X and Windows drivers on purpose to get cMP owners to migrate to PC and to teach Apple a lesson for choosing AMD.

SoyCapitan, about your issues with a flashed 680.

Did you keep the Rom that came with the card?

Windows doesn't read the EFI Rom, but OS X, at least use to read the PC Bios Rom and set some of the timings of the card from it. If your using a Rom with incorrect timings for your card in the PC Bios part of the Rom, it could effect Windows and OS X.

I've never rolled my own EFI Rom, so I'm not sure what timings must be edited from the PC Bois part and put into the EFI part, but that may be giving you trouble also, Netkas or MVC would know about that.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

SoyCapitan, about your issues with a flashed 680.

Did you keep the Rom that came with the card?

Windows doesn't read the EFI Rom, but OS X, at least use to read the PC Bios Rom and set some of the timings of the card from it. If your using a Rom with incorrect timings for your card in the PC Bios part of the Rom, it could effect Windows and OS X.

If you're talking about the majority of bugs listed on those forums, they affect Kepler and Maxwell cards with or without EFI ROM. It's the web driver that caused OpenCL crashes and visual artefacts. I don't know if the bugs are still present in the last driver update because I have removed the 680 and web driver from my cMP. But the bugs had been there since Yosemite and were progressively accumulating and still present in 10.11.4

As for the EFI ROM, it was the standard EVGA rip that everyone uses. I have removed it for now and the card works proper in Windows now. I will thoroughly test the 10 series in every way possible on both platforms with CPU bound and GPU bound applications.

I am not surprised some people don't understand what a device specific driver is and how new hardware require one to enable new features, but then I'm completely aware that in this day and age a lot of 'happy customers' are salesmen posing as customers online. They don't like technical questions that can hurt sales.

 

[666sheep]

in this day and age a lot of 'happy customers' are salesmen posing as customers online.

According to that logic you're selling Win 10

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

According to that logic you're selling Win 10

I am!

 

[DearthnVader]

As for the EFI ROM, it was the standard EVGA rip that everyone uses.

Rom's are tricky things, there are thousands of timing parameters to initialize the GPU and VRam, the GPU registers shouldn't be an issue, but VRam varies from card to card, day of the week, price, supplier. nVidia's board partners have a program that they plug the VRam timing parameters into and it spits them out a Bios.

There is also a resister that sets a strap, to select timing parameters, I always found it was best to override this resister in the Bios with a mask in the nvstrap, or cards did not always work as expected.

I don't see any reports of trouble in Photoshop under OS X or Windows for Retail 680 Mac Edition owners, surely there are a few of them around, get one of them to reproduce this "bug" and we'll all admit it's a bug and not just a bad flash on an unsupported video card by someone who doesn't understand what they're doing.

 

[MacVidCards]

He hasn't got even the slightest clue what he is typing. He put wrong rom on a 680 and blames Nvidia.

 

[Asgorath]

I am not surprised some people don't understand what a device specific driver is and how new hardware require one to enable new features, but then I'm completely aware that in this day and age a lot of 'happy customers' are salesmen posing as customers online. They don't like technical questions that can hurt sales.

I understand exactly what a device driver is. I'm asking you to back up your claims that there's no Maxwell-specific code in the NVIDIA web driver, or that API-agnostic hardware features like color compression aren't being used. You've been presenting your opinions about the state of Maxwell on OS X as facts that everyone should just believe. However, I haven't seen any actual evidence to back up your claims. Do you have inside knowledge from NVIDIA about the state of Maxwell or Pascal?

You probably have me on ignore or something, since I haven't seen a response from you in a while. As I've said many times, there's a really simple explanation for the cherry-picked results you keep quoting. BareFeats showed results that had Maxwell well ahead of Kepler. BareFeats showed a small subset of results that showed web driver improvements when they were first released. This second set had many CPU-limited cases to highlight the improvements in the web driver, which meant the Maxwell differences were small or non-existent. Maybe BareFeats should've included all the tests from the first set so you'd believe that L4D2 and other GPU-limited apps are still way faster with Maxwell.

 

[DearthnVader]

He hasn't got even the slightest clue what he is typing. He put wrong rom on a 680 and blames Nvidia.

You can lead a horse to water..................

Makes me wonder if the people reporting trouble with the 970 didn't have the same issue, the wrong card flashed by an Ebay seller with one of your EFI Roms.