Does Mountain Lion natively support the new nVidia GTX cards?

[Drew Lahat]

I'm planning to buy a GTX570/580/670/680. There's plenty of discussions about comparisons, performance, etc. but one thing confuses me:

I understand that OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) has native drivers for these cards. Do you still need the flashed versions from MacVidCards, then? And if so, why?

We're using Premiere Pro CS6, After Effects, and DaVinci Resolve. We have 2010 Mac Pros.

 

[Matthew B]

It just comes down to this:

1. Non flashed cards will not show a screen during boot.
2. Non flashed cards will not run at full PCI speed. (I think 8x drops to 4x).

If you are using it as a CUDA only card, for davinci, then #1 is not an issue. Not sure how much speed is affected with #2.

I think the 570 is the best option - the 600 series is not as fast with CUDA, and the 580 requires too much power with the stock Power supply.

I am holding out for the 10.8.3 public release to see the status of the 7970 driver - although if you use resolve and cs6 exclusively, the CUDA support will outweigh the impressive openCL performance of the 7970.

 

[Drew Lahat]

Are you sure about the half speed thing? Haven't heard that elsewhere. (And I suppose you meant 16x drops to 8x, even the lowliest GPUs run at 16x.)

 

[Elliott Balsley]

Matthew is correct. The cards run at half speed. Although technically they still use the same number of lanes, the lanes are restricted to PCIe 1.0 speeds. How much you'll actually notice that drop is debatable, and depends on your usage. David Pirinelli, the MacVidCards hacker, explains some of this here: http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/277/16744

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Without the proper combination of EFI and driver support under OSX, the nVidia cards don't come out of low-power mode. That is technically what the issue is, so the PCIe access is restricted to v1.x speeds, they drop from 5GT/s to 2.5GT/s. Apparently some models of nVidia cards don't suffer from this issue, but I have yet to confidently identify them. Some of the easy load drivers and other utilities out there can make them load and work properly, but Apple likes to sabotage those illicit attempts.

I have recommended use of unofficially supported nVidia cards off and on, as things have varied with each OSX release. The GTX570 works pretty good with OSX 10.8, but does tend to get stuck at 2.5GT/s link speed for many people. So I still recommend the official Quadro 4000 if people want the most reliable option.

Using a properly modded card like the ones from MacVidCards is probably the safest bet here. He seems to have the best ones out there and actually creates and tweaks his own EFI code. Most of the other hack-jobs on the market are GTX cards re-flashed with a GTX285 Mac ROM. Tons of GTX27x cards floating around with that ROM installed and being sold as if they were actually proper Mac GTX cards. Those units typically fail as soon as the user stresses them or overruns the available RAM, as it's different than what is reported in its EFI ROM.

The one thing that most people incorrectly assume is that Apple is trying to keep away all these video card options. That's not true. They just want all the video cards available for their systems to have proper EFI support and undergo the "Made for Mac" approval process. Something PNY/nVidia have done with the Qudro 4000, EGA did with the GTX285 Mac Edition, and so on down the line. Here and there these card makers dip their toes in the water, but in the end they keep coming up with the same results and conclusions. The market just isn't there on a broad scale. The vast majority of people buying Mac systems are buying Macbook whatevers and iMacs. No upgradeable GPUs. It's a comparatively small percentage who buy the Mac Pro. And the vast majority of those customers have their needs served with Apple's standard offerings. Very few go out looking for graphics card upgrades. The small handful of us here and on the CreativeCow forums are pretty much it. EVGA saw with their GTX285 attempt on the Mac that the bulk of the people buying were gamers who just happened to have a Mac Pro. Some creative professionals did go that route, but the overall sales of the card were very low. After a few short and rather small production runs, they discontinued the card. It was time anyway, as the PC version of the card was also discontinued -- the whole line was after the GTX400 series had been out for a bit.

I do think there would be far more interest in mainstream GPU offerings for the Mac if Apple released a mainstream desktop or tower system that could use those cards. The Mac Pro is very niche -- it's a dual-Xeon workstation with a $2500 entry price that buys little more than a bare-bones config.

All that said, I still think a Quadro 4000 Mac Edition card is the best GPU currently in the Mac Pro. It takes a single slot and only one 6-pin power connector, can be doubled up for Resolve if necessary and plays nice with PCIe expansion boxes. The GTX570 is intriguing as an alternate solution, but there seems to be some differences across the cards out there and some work better than others. I actually don't know which one to recommend, but I would probably go with the MacVidCards option to gain a usable EFI option. Even with that, there is still no guaranty that the card will continue to work within future OSX and nVidia driver releases on the Mac platform. Chances are, that will never be an issue, but with it not being an official product, there is always a chance of support disappearing without warning.

 

[Drew Lahat]

Thanks for the detailed response, Jeff. I hope this thread doesn't turn into a generic Mac Pro rant, all I'd say is that we're still enjoying our 2009 and 2010 Mac Pro's
(we deal with HD much more than RED, so our performance needs are lighter). We plan to get another couple of years out of them, and see what Tim Cook's 2013 "exciting news" is all about.

The Quadro has its benefits, although for the price, a (working) GTX570 gives you twice as much FPS in one card and roughly 3 times the FPS per dollar. I also need Adobe more than Resolve, and Adobe doesn't support multiple GPUs (does it?). No plans for a Cubix here.

I ended up ordering a GTX570 from MacVidCards. Your post just made me feel better about the choice

 

[david_winters]

Lurker here... Reading this thread pushed me to order a GTX570 from MacVidCards today. If it all works out, I plan to order 4 more cards for our remaining macpros.

Thank you all for the info. I will report back once we have the card installed. Primary usage is CS6 Premiere, but I also want to experiment with Resolve.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

I'm running one of their 570s in my main box; I would give them a thumbs up. No problems; plug & go.

Mike