2008 Mac Pro (3,1), HD4870, 10.7.4 = game fail?

[emt377]

Never had a problem with this computer until I upgraded to 10.7.4... Now I can't play any games on it; after about a minute it panics. Happens with any Valve game, WoW, and Diablo 3 and it's always in the apple.security.sandbox kext. And it happens every time I run a game, any game. Display is a Dell 3008.

The running process is always mds (the spotlight indexing master).

I also have an old 2600XT driving a couple of side screens that are only used for Terminal, Mail, VMs, etc.

Thoughts? Is there any way to back out a system upgrade on OS X?

Edit: I did do a disk and perm repair, and reset the PRAM. No go.

 

[gpzjock]

Never had any problems with WoW or Steam under Snowy (10.6.x) with 4870 or 5870 cards maybe Loin has issues with older GFX drivers like it has with older software. I would make a clean install of Snow Leopard on a secondary hard drive or partition and boot from that to test the difference.
It could be a hardware fault, if the fan is not coping with the heat generated by heavy use then the 4870 will shut down before it melts.
This in turn may cause error messages within the OS.

 

[emt377]

On closer inspection it's a CPU not responding to interrupt in a timely manner. Which in turn sounds like a deadlock or a spinlock held too long...

Thought it might be a vmware kext, so upgraded VMware Fusion to the latest micro version, but no go. (v3 not v4.) Perhaps v4 would work better on Lion.

 

[emt377]

So I finally had a day off and time to diagnose this further... Pulled the 4870 and used only the 2600XT and it's all fine, apart from hideously poor performance. Moved the 2600XT to the same slot (#0?) as the 4870 was in and it was still good. I think the 2600 uses fewer lanes, so it's not a perfect verification that something isn't wrong with the slot, but at this point it looks 90% certain there's a heat-related hardware problem with the 4870. (If course, the 2600 doesn't use the Nvidia drivers, so there could still be a software problem. But in my experience software problems tend to be more random; this is too specific.)

Ordered a 5870 (1GB) to replace it... hopefully this will work better.

Edit: brain fart. Obviously the 4870/5870 don't use Nvidia drivers!