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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 :)

Recommend the best GPU for Mac Pro

Matthew Love

Matthew Love

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Running squadron 4000 and feel like I could be doing much better.

Wlll the gtx 580 fly?
 
GTX580 needs supplemental power. You also need to do a bit of hacking, typically to the card's BIOS/EFI ROM to get it to run at 100% capacity on a Mac. That part about the hacking is true of most every graphics card that is not Mac-specific.

I think the GTX570 is probably the most well-rounded choice for a Mac Pro at this moment. It doesn't overdraw the power allotment in the Mac Pro and while not the most capable GPU, is still a formidable CUDA card that falls in-line with the PCIe v2 hardware and other attributes of the current Mac Pro tower.

The Quadro 4000 is still the more logical choice for a worry-free installation. For OpenGL performance in pro OpenGL applications, is the same speed as the GTX570 or a bit faster. It's 30% slower for gaming and texture performance. About 15~20% slower for CUDA...

Another thing to consider, depending on which software you're running and what you're trying to do, the GPU may not be the bottleneck. Other than running Resolve, especially if this is on an older 2009 or earlier Mac Pro, I can almost guaranty you that the GPU is not your bottleneck.
 
Thanks Jeff,

it's a 2010 mac pro quad core, 2.8ghz running 32gb of RAM.

Is there a way power wise to run my quadro 4000 as the GUI and a GTX570 as my GPU just for faster renders in resolve? Can the mac pro not supply the power needed to run both cards?
 
Hey Matthew,

I can't answer your question about power, but I can affirm that the 570 is an incredible beast of a card (for my needs) and there was absolutely zero hassle with installation. I am running it as you propose, as a dedicated GPU card with a GTX 120 as the GUI in slot 1. Wastes a slot, sure, but with no RAID or Rocket that's no problem. I can render out ProRes 4444 footage with several blur nodes windows secondaries etc at 40 fps+. Raw uncompressed CinmeaDNG (basically 2K TIFF sequences), graded and processed to ACES color space w/ rec709 output transform, the 570 renders faster than realtime. Awesome.

My card is not flashed, but it is running in the second slot. I just wasn't able to get it from MacVidCards in LA in time for a project. Good guys though I'd recommend em if you end up running the 570 alone.

What do you guys think, if I pull my GT 120 and run the 2010 mac pro solely off the 570 (2.5G VRAM), would I see a performance increase by getting the EFI/BIOS flashed? (Thanks!)
 
Ryan can you link me to the 50 you purchased ?

Is there anyway power wise for me to run the 570 in slot 1 and my quadro 4000 in slot 2 ?

I also have a rocket and sas card. I need more pci slots! Haha
 
As much as I trust the MacVidCard guys... isn't that just keeping a big shark in a little cage? Using custom firmware or whatever to underclock or whatever this is called, assuming the card will always obey that instruction... I've heard of the sounds and smells that come out of an overtaxed MacPro and it's not just the power supply that can blow all at once....

I would love to hear from Dave @ MacVidCards about exactly how he makes the 580 run that way. Maybe it's real simple or maybe it's his trade secret but bottom line I would want to know that it will never choke on the new firmware or whatever and accidentally pull too much juice. Would it not be safer and simpler to safely use an external power supply and the wiring Dave recommends?

At least when it comes to generators wendylights 18Ks three phase distro and everything else I've encountered, it's pretty much always great to run an electrical system well below any dangerous limit, with the load nicely balanced, rather than have one clever re-wired component that puts it just under the maximum threshold using an unintended configuration.

Someone correct me if I'm way off, I know pretty much zip about internal power in a MacPro.
 
I've been running GTX 580's in my MacPro's for about a year. It works great and stable. The 6-pin motherboards connectors are rated at 75w, but they can sustain much more.

Those who have run into problems; have either over-clocked their cards, or used factory over-clocked cards with 2x8 pin connectors.

Get a 3GB card and remember that you must do a small hex-edit to enable OpenCL (it get's blocked by OSX if you have a card with more than 2GB).
 
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I recommend the NVIDIA 680 4GB. No hex edit required to enable OpenCL when running OS X 10.8.3.x (currently in late stage beta available from developer's) or with final release of 10.8.3 whenever that happens -- any day now. Plus the card runs with less watts than the 580 and while it uses a 6-to-8 pin adapter for one of the power cables, it's total wattage under load is well under the 75w+75w+150w limits by the PCI slot and PCI power cables.

All-in-all, the 680 is an awesome card. Only draw-back is no bios or boot screen.
 
The OpenCL hack takes a couple of minutes, including research and download of tools, but if the 4GB works with OpenCL in OSX 10.8.3, we can expect other cards with more than two gigabytes of ram to work as well...

I agree that the GTX680 seems like a nice option for a MacPro, but in a test done late last year, even the GTX570 performed faster than the GTX680 in Resolve. Maybe it has changed, maybe it has not... without anyone doing a new benchmark it's hard to tell.
 
Rob Anderson said:
It's a better card.
Click to expand...

Better for what?

http://www.barefeats.com/rogue04.html

Even the GTX570 outperforms the GTX680 in this test. Maybe drivers and software are better optimised now (this test is from september), but it's an established fact that the GTX680 cards are slower for many computational tasks in professional applications.
 
I still stand by my GTX570 recommendation. The GTX680 is indeed the better card, if the system were able to fully utilize it.... If....

The main advantage to the 680 over 570 and 580 is power consumption. You can run a 680 in a Mac Pro tower without worrying about over-drawing as you might with the 580. So in that regard, perhaps I would consider a 680 at this time over the 570 -- they consume similar amounts of power. The 680 stands to be the superior card, even on OSX, if CUDA and driver support continues to mature. Even with the lack of proper PCIe bus support for the card. At any rate, without an EFI hack on the card, any of these cards, you're only getting a piece of the total performance you should.

CUDA on the Mac has only received one significant update since september and both CUDA and the OSX graphics drivers still have very weak and incomplete support for the Kepler architecture. However, I have not been running Resolve on the Mac much, not since v9 came out of beta. For may day to day work, I still prefer OSX over Windows, but I have so much more raw power at my fingertips on a PC, for right now anyway. My Mac Pro systems seem like they're collecting dust. I do use one to generate ProRes when needed, other than that, my primary Macs that get used are my 2011 iMac and my MBP Retina.

Any way you slice it though, GTX cards on the Mac are still a pain. I run across all too many people who are running them straight off the shelf with no EFI mods and I don't seem to understand how they can rave about performance of these cards in the Mac. Not when by default they run in "low power" mode where they won't spin up the fans, won't operate at full bus speed, mostly run the GPU at idle clock the whole time. Here and there I see reports of cards running properly without an EFI hack, I know it happens, I've run across a PNY GTX570 card that worked at full capacity without the hack. But those are few and far between and oddly enough, I bought a second one of those PNY 570's, but even though it appeared to be the same card and had the same firmware revision, it always defaulted to low power mode.


For running Premiere or most anything else, I wouldn't stress over the card. A Quadro 4000 isn't half bad at all and even has a few advantages. For about the same price, you can get a properly modded GTX570 or GTX580 and they work great too -- the latter being questionable in terms of power consumption. If you ever do manage to put the card under heavy load, it could indeed over-draw the power through the logic board. Chances are, you won't be over-loading it in Premiere. Premiere rarely taxes the GPU very heavily.

Resolve is a different matter. One good dedicated GPU is often good enough for most common coloring workflows, but two can be better. Three is going to be overkill most of the time, we're going to run into plenty of other bottlenecks before all 3 cards are fully stressed.
 
I've got two macpros with CUDA cards. One 570 one 580 with a $35 external power supply. Both cards from Dave@ mac vid cards. The only reason I bought the 580 was because a 570 was not available the week I needed a second card.
 
I have to agree with Jeff. We've found the 570 is a sweet spot for ML. The underclocked flashed 480 is great for Snow Leopard for the folks keeping to that OS. Just to put it into perspective with Dave's cards, we get identical numbers with the 480s vs 570 with the 480 edging it out in a few benchmarks. This is the 1.2GB off-the-shelf model. Yes, it does boot perfectly into ML with 10.8.2 and current drivers. But in any other machine (Windows/Linux) the 570 is a clear winner, so you can clearly see how they are being handicapped (570s).
 
So am I understanding this correctly that a 670, 680, or 690 won't work to its full speed with osx 10.8.2 and resolve unless it is a modified version of the card? Just curious as they are recommended in the davinci Mac config guide.
 
Jon MIchael Puntervold said:
Are you sure this is the case now, with nVidia supporting the GTX-cards in their driver package for Mac?
Click to expand...

Yes. Most all the cards still need a proper EFI ROM to enable full performance, clock speed and fan control, full bus speed, full memory access... It does not need to be a hacked Mac-specific EFI. GPUs are open on the Mac now, but they do need a proper EFI / UEFI ROM for full integration.
 
Jeff, what tools can you use to check if the GTX card is running in low-power mode, or if the pci-bus is at half speed?
 
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