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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 :)

EVGA GTX 680 for Mac

Just saw that this morning. Too bad Apple doesn't have a consumer-oriented tower offering that could use this card since it would be perfect for Mac gaming.
 
Current Mac Pro (4,1 and 5,1 variant), even the prior generation '09 Mac Pro 3,1, will use this card just fine.

Anyway, it's nice to see graphics card vendors are seeing the potential market. I'm also hoping it's a sign that a new Mac Pro is not too far off. Actually, I'm expecting it to ship with the next round of Xeon CPUs. Too bad Intel is so vague on release scheduling because that next round of Xeons could happen anywhere between tomorrow and the end of the year. Supposedly the chips are ready...

Only catch with the card is it will run in PCIe v2.0 mode, which means its potential bandwidth is crippled. No video card truly uses PCIe v3 bandwidth, not even close. I wouldn't sweat over that one. Glad to see this happening. It just became a whole lot easier to recommend a video card for a Mac Pro! :)

I saw mention of it the other day and thought it was an April fools prank. hehe.

Too bad they didn't make it a 4GB version...
 
i have to admit i'm a bit confused with all the various NVIDIA offerings of late. i'm running a much older card in tandem with my ATI for GUI (the exact model i have escapes me as i'm a few thousand miles from my mac pro, but it was one of the recommended cards for a basic davinci setup).

also remember hearing that PC-format NVIDIA cards were now useable in the mac universe.

so is this 680 a significant bang for the buck? been looking to upgrade to something a bit punchier, and this pricepoint isn't too terrible.
 
A lot depends on your current system and what GPU you currently have. While newer GPUs keep coming out that have more capabilities, those capabilities are spread out across the entire range of features of those cards. Most of the improvements over the past few generations have been related to bandwidth, as in data throughput, texture and shader pipelines. For computational use, it's been a roller-coaster ride. It may be a good upgrade for you, it may not be. Need more info.

Apple opened up the graphics driver interface and GPU support a few years ago now. Starting with OSX 10.4, mostly open in 10.5, but fully open in 10.6 and later. The catch is that Apple does not use PC style BIOS functionality. A video card must have an EFI ROM in the form of a proprietary Apple EFI or an open standard U-EFI. The later is what PCs are starting to transition too, but for some reason it's taking forever for it to happen. Then again, the backward compatibility and legacy support of the PC world is both one of it's greatest strengths and its greatest folly. Video card makers must also supply drivers -- just as any peripheral card maker must do.

In the case of both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI drivers, they are now supplied directly to Apple by those respective manufacturers and also updated independently. So the nvidia drivers on OSX now have full support for their range of current GeForce cards. Where we run into issues is that without the EFI ROM, we don't get video support on the system for boot menus or other operations that occur before the OS loads video drivers. Once in the OS, with the drivers loaded, we have video support and most things work as they should. But some cards still encounter issues if they have special power management requirements or other functions that differ from the default specs supported by the drivers. So without a proper EFI, some cards won't report their proper RAM sizes or won't control their fans as ideally as they should, on previous OSX releases and earlier nvidia driver bundles, some cards would not come out of low-power mode. So this is what has spurred a secondary market for "hacked" video cards where the onboard ROM of a stock PC card is over-written with a Mac-compliant EFI firmware to make everything work as it should.

With a proper EFI ROM on the card everything works as it should and no hacking. That's what is being sold with these Mac Edition video cards. It's a regular and fully functional GTX680 video card in this case, but has a proper EFI ROM so the Mac will show the apple-logo startup screen, will allow pre-OS boot menus and all that. The card is properly profiled in system info and all power management functions work as they should.

If Apple were to release a new line-up of Mac systems that accept video cards like this, I'm sure more vendors would step up to offer them. Especially if they had more offerings than a single top-tier Xeon workstation, which is overkill for most customers.
 
got it, jeff. good info. thanks! i'll have to start digging in to this more!
 
Next version of Premiere will support multiple GPUs for export/ rendering. :)
 
I agree too bad it doesn't have 4gb of RAM. I have to turn Mercury GPU off in Premiere when editing R3Ds because it's actually faster using CPU. And I have a Quadro 4000 Mac. I think I might have to go to the K5000 to really get the benefit.
 
Me too actually. I am hoping this GTX680 will be a big step up from my current GTX285. Maybe I'll be able to turn on my Mercury after I install my new card. Got one order from OWC, 2 day wait atm.



David Kudell said:
I have to turn Mercury GPU off in Premiere when editing R3Ds because it's actually faster using CPU.
Click to expand...
 
I've got the ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB and I've got 2 27" apple displays connected via mini display ports (no adapters) and a third monitor connected to the DVI output. 3 Monitors off one card. Not the fastest card out there, but it works a treat for the cinema displays.
 
Guess it's a bit early for speed comparisons?
 
Hopefully somebody soon can do some tests with the GTX680.
 
I just spent a few days with this card, and unfortunately, I am sending it back. The GTX-680 requires 10.8.3, and right now my Sonnet QIO does NOT support 10.8.3, so it is one or the other. I did a few tests with the GTX-680 before re-boxing it. I was getting 65fps transcoding in Resolve of Alexa ProRes4444 Log-C to ProRes 422LT 709 files. I get 50fps doing the same thing with my Quadro4000. I was expecting a much more significant speed boost. I'm running a Mac Pro 12-core, 48gigs RAM, 24TB RAID with speeds of 900MB/s. I run the GUI monitor on a separate graphics card.
 
John Waterman said:
I just spent a few days with this card, and unfortunately, I am sending it back. The GTX-680 requires 10.8.3, and right now my Sonnet QIO does NOT support 10.8.3, so it is one or the other. I did a few tests with the GTX-680 before re-boxing it. I was getting 65fps transcoding in Resolve of Alexa ProRes4444 Log-C to ProRes 422LT 709 files. I get 50fps doing the same thing with my Quadro4000. I was expecting a much more significant speed boost. I'm running a Mac Pro 12-core, 48gigs RAM, 24TB RAID with speeds of 900MB/s. I run the GUI monitor on a separate graphics card.
Click to expand...

How'd you test it if it needs Mountain Lion, but you're running Lion?
 
Well Waterman, it's a start at least. Thanks for posting. Did you do any playback tests in Premiere Pro? Wondering if you can get smooth 1/2 playback with the GTX680.
 
Well I got my GTX680 and am braining storming what tests to do. I can't find any out online yet. I only care about CS6 smooth playback resolution. Hoping to get 1/2 res. I'm doing okay at 1/4th now with the GTX285. Only 1/8th in RCX though.

Any suggestion welcome.
 
It's probably not going to speed up your playback in Premiere a whole lot, but it should offer more stable performance on GPU-accelerated FX, transitions, transformations like scaling and rotation. If you can get 1/4 fine now and are not too far off of getting 1/2 to work, it may give you just enough extra oomph to do it. I haven't come up with a good way to benchmark GPUs within CS6. It's obvious that they help, but R3D's are still bottlenecked by the decode process and that is entirely dependent on your CPU(s) and Rocket (if available).

If you're using Resolve, you should see a pretty big and noticeable boost there.
 
Yeah, Resolve will be a nice addition. Very soon.

Wish there was more Reviews of the GTX680.
 
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