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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Best graphics card for current 12 core mac tower?

T

Tucker Spofford

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What's the most powerful card I can put in the current 12 core mac tower, that will accelerate Adobe Premiere and After Effects CS6?

I think it's the Nvidia GTX 580? Or is the GTX680 also compatible?
 
gtx 580 will work right away with latest nvidia drivers for lion, not sure about 10.7.4 though, that broke nvidia drivers as every update does, not sure if they fixed it yet.

however the 580 may overdraw the power existing in the tower, as the PSU wasn't meant to handle that much power consumption. not sure about the 680 but i'm sure it draws even more power. you may have to look into a external powering solution for the 580.

best bang for the buck in my opinion are flashed 470's. they wont' over draw your system, and still have a lot of cuda power for the system.
 
Tom.Wong said:
gtx 580 will work right away with latest nvidia drivers for lion, not sure about 10.7.4 though, that broke nvidia drivers as every update does, not sure if they fixed it yet.

however the 580 may overdraw the power existing in the tower, as the PSU wasn't meant to handle that much power consumption. not sure about the 680 but i'm sure it draws even more power. you may have to look into a external powering solution for the 580.

best bang for the buck in my opinion are flashed 470's. they wont' over draw your system, and still have a lot of cuda power for the system.
Click to expand...

Tom, are you saying that no cuda acceleration then with any of the NVIDIA cards with 10.7.4 ? I've got a Quadro 4000 and on 10.7.4 and latest NVIDIA drivers/firmware/Cuda....and not sure i get anything out of the card...maybe this explains things....but are you sure about this?

Thanks....
 
Jeff Kilgroe has written extensively and accurately on this topic
 
Positive. Apple updates have been killing nvidia drivers since 10.6.6. U gotta be careful nd wait before ne os update. Id keep an eye out for new nvidia/cuda drivers. Should fix ur woes
 
Tom.Wong said:
Positive. Apple updates have been killing nvidia drivers since 10.6.6. U gotta be careful nd wait before ne os update. Id keep an eye out for new nvidia/cuda drivers. Should fix ur woes
Click to expand...

That likely explains the incredibly poor performance i get now....at least i hope so....thanks Tom
 
I've got a PNY GTX580 3GB card in an '09 Mac Pro right now. Running OSX 10.7.4 and latest nVidia drivers... Here's the pros/cons of that configuration:

Pros:

It's cheaper than a Quadro 4000 and is a badass card if you also boot into Windows or Linux on the same system. CUDA performance is great -- a little better than the Quadro 4000, even when running on the Mac and given the other shortcomings I'm about to list. Under Windows, it screams, it smokes the Quadro 6000 in everything but OpenGL performance when in Windows. And that comes down to different driver optimizations.


Cons:

Drivers do not currently support proper power management or monitoring, fan control, etc.. for the card. It really does need a hack to work 100% properly. Drivers only see and allow for using 2GB of that 3GB onboard RAM. OpenGL performance is abysmal -- Cinebench scores are 30% less than the Quadro 4000 and so is overall OpenGL performance in apps like Maya, Lightwave, etc..

So... GTX580 makes a great secondary GPU in a PCIe expander for CUDA processing. Cheaper than a Tesla card and almost as good. Great primary card if you will be spending most of your time in Windows or Linux, but it's a dog in OSX unless we start hacking some config files and whatnot to make it work properly.



All things considered, I think the best card to buy for a current Mac Pro (or 2009 model, possibly '08 model if you still think it's worth spending money on) is the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition. It's officially supported, although the superior drivers come from nVidia, not Apple, so OSX updates tend to break compatibility with the latest "good" drivers until nVidia releases their updates a week or so later. IMO, not a big deal, on a production system no one should ever jump on a new OS update when first released.

The Quadro 4000 is a solid card, only takes one slot width and one 6-pin power connector. Two of them fit great inside a Mac Pro for additional CUDA acceleration in Resolve. If you need more 3D / OpenGL horsepower than what the Qudro 4000 gives you, then you probably should be looking at a Windows or Linux box for your software anyway. For 2D performance it does great. Personally, I think some of the ATI cards handle better under OSX for 2D performance and overall smoothness in running the GUI. The ATI 5870 isn't a bad card either and has decent OpenCL performance for FCPX. It's not on the supported list for CS6, but I believe you can change the text in the config file to make it work, just as you can with nVidia cards for CUDA. MPE does support OpenCL now, but it's not as complete or robust as the abilities with CUDA.
 
You can power the 580 fine as long as it's running at stock speed. You need a 6-pin to 8-pin adapter for one of the PCIe power cables.

That said, I don't recommend the card in the Mac. I've played with it more today and it's just not a good way to go in OSX, none of these GTX5xx cards are. Get the Quadro 4000 Mac edition. Used ones are about $150 more than GTX580, but overall performance is better and to have proper support is huge. While I stated above that CUDA performance is good on OSX, I have to retract that somewhat. It can be good, but can be bad. Only time it's good is if the drivers aren't' flaking out and you're running it as a secondary GPU for processing in Resolve. Otherwise the card is like dragging a power-sucking boat anchor. Get the Quadro.

GTX570 has all the same restrictions. The driver support is there to make those cards work, but they don't work well. Not by a long shot with the current OSX and driver implementations. If you run these as a secondary CUDA GPU, you will need a primary GPU that doesn't use additional power connectors, or will need to pull power from somewhere else. In a 2008 Mac Pro, you can pull from the optical bays. In a 2009 and 2010 Mac Pro, you would need external power.

If you need a dual-GPU setup for Resolve, but want your primary GPU to also offer decent acceleration, your best bet is to go with the Quadro 4000 as your primary GPU and then use another for the second, or use a PCIe expansion box that can take other cards and put a GTX580 out there solely for CUDA.... And pray it works when you need it to.
 
And Jeff continues to be the gold standard for technical information
 
Jeff has the best knowledge on the cards for sure.

Just to throw in my random opinion, I'm running a GTX 570 on my Mac system (10.7.3) and am pleased with the performance. Of course, I don't own a Quadro card to know what ultimate GPU speed looks like... but switching between software acceleration and GPU MPE is a big difference.
 
Rounded up two new cards to add to the mix -- EVGA GTX570 w/2.5GB and ASUS GTX 560 w/1.5GB.

Preliminary test results mostly confirm what I've found before. The cards work just fine, but the drivers don't bother to interface with them and control them properly for power management, fan speed, etc.. The Apple EFI is specifically locking out unapproved or non-AEFI video display adapters from logging entries in the EFI device table and the EFI system won't pull a BIOS entry (as it normally would) for these non-AEFI display cards. So we get errors in Profiler when we try to view the PCIe adapter list with one of these cards installed.

Some of the cards are being locked to 2.5GT/s interface mode, but not all. It's not a PCIe 1.x downgrade as the MacVidCards guy is claiming, the cards are still interfacing in v2.0 mode. But most of these cards, nVidia and ATI, will fall back to 2.5GT/s transaction mode when in idle or low-power state, as Subhadip Sen pointed out earlier in this discussion. The OS is holding them there without proper driver interaction and/or proper EFI table entries. I also find it curious that the same restrictions to the EFI table are in place when entering the bootcamp loader and subsequently starting Windows. Crippled performance in Windows on a Mac when running these cards. Nice, Apple...

Now for the curious part... We're not seeing this issue on Hackintosh systems. Most boot loaders on the Hackinmac systems like unibeast/multibeast, etc.. hash together an EFI table of sorts from UEFI and BIOS entries on the PC. It pulls the data from these video cards and there becomes a proper table entry for them. The cards work as they should in OSX on a Hackintosh! But on a real Mac Pro, the cards are crippled. So, there are a few ways around this...

1> flash the cards with a proper EFI to enable the missing control. That's what this MacVidCards guy is doing with his and he seems to be doing a pretty good job. Of course, he can only go as far and enable as much as what the current nVidia drivers will allow. For example, he's not going to squeeze more than 2GB of usable RAM out of a Quadro 6000 under OSX.

2> Leave the card be and hack the nVidia drivers. By doing this, we don't get the EFI boot screens and other pre-OS functionality / menus / etc.. Can't have the ability to profile the installed PCIe cards and other little issues will still be there. We would have to re-do a new hack each time OSX updates and nVidia releases new drivers. This is hardly an efficient solution.

3> Retro-fit an EFI profiling utility that can intervene at boot time or shortly after and construct proper EFI table entries where needed. Essentially doing on the Mac what is being done on the PC Hackintosh. I don't know if this is possible and how much access without major hacking is possible. So far it seems like option #1 is the way to go unless #3 proves to be a lot easier than I imagine it is. I'm pretty sure we'd be treated to a panic screen if we tried to mod the EFI table once the OS takes hold.


I really don't understand the purpose behind crippling the display adapters. This is an OSX 10.7.x thing where nVidia has actually included support for these cards in the drivers, but has crippled them if they don't have a proper Apple EFI installed. I wonder if this is per an Apple request or what's going on. I'm thinking it is an Apple restriction as apprently ATI cards have the same issues, but I haven't done any testing with them. Previously in 10.6.x, we could mod a kext file or two and the cards would work just fine after flashing them, some even without flashing (just no pre-OS EFI functionality). The new drivers on 10.7 don't have the same configuration files to mod, it's all in-built into the drivers. Although, config files may be tucked inside one of the driver files and I just haven't poked around in there to try and find that stuff yet.

I might poke around a bit more with the drivers, but I think most of my work here is done. So when it all comes down to it, I recommend the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition right now, until something better comes along.

If you want to go a different route and try to squeeze some better CUDA and gaming / light-duty OpenGL performance out of a card, I would go for the GTX570, possibly a GTX580 that has been flashed by the MacVidCards guy. If you're running a Hackintosh, the GTX570 and GTX580 cards are where it's at right now, no mods required.
 
My flashed GTX570 2.5GB should be arriving from Macvidcards today. Will try to get it into my system as soon as I can and write up a few notes for everyone that is curious about the performance of it under the latest OS. Thanks for all of the useful information as usual Jeff.
 
William Schultz said:
My flashed GTX570 2.5GB should be arriving from Macvidcards today. Will try to get it into my system as soon as I can and write up a few notes for everyone that is curious about the performance of it under the latest OS. Thanks for all of the useful information as usual Jeff.
Click to expand...

No problem. :) And your flashed 570 should work great!

FWIW, it seems that those on OSX 10.6.8 should stick with the GTX4xx series and if you want to run the GTX5xx series, you need to move to OSX 10.7.3 or later.
 
If anyone has a GTX 570 with or without the EFI rom soldered you can try and delete the:

AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext" from your Extensions folder

This causes the card to power down when not under load
 
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