Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Frequently Asked Questions About NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Cards

Status
The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
Status
Not open for further replies.
Hello! First thank you for the thread, it helps a lot for me that don't know a lot about hardware.

I bought a old tower (4,1) from eBay (haven't got it yet) with titan X (un-flashed) installed in it and I have a question... So I see now with Nvidia release the driver there isn't a lot benefit for it to be flashed( I don't use bootcamp and I don't really care the boot screen) But, I still need to restore the computer from my Time Machine of my old laptop once I get it... Now without the boot screen how am I gonna do it?

Also if I managed to restore it from my TM, will it boot normally so I can go and download the web driver? My TM OS is the newest one. If I can't should I do what 24) mentioned or this from macvidcard :http://www.macvidcards.com/how-do-i-install-new-drivers-if-i-cant-boot-without-drivers.html ??

Thank you all in advance for helping me!
 
lchenye said:
Hello! First thank you for the thread, it helps a lot for me that don't know a lot about hardware.

I bought a old tower (4,1) from eBay (haven't got it yet) with titan X (un-flashed) installed in it and I have a question... So I see now with Nvidia release the driver there isn't a lot benefit for it to be flashed( I don't use bootcamp and I don't really care the boot screen) But, I still need to restore the computer from my Time Machine of my old laptop once I get it... Now without the boot screen how am I gonna do it?

Also if I managed to restore it from my TM, will it boot normally so I can go and download the web driver? My TM OS is the newest one. If I can't should I do what 24) mentioned or this from macvidcard :http://www.macvidcards.com/how-do-i-install-new-drivers-if-i-cant-boot-without-drivers.html ??

Thank you all in advance for helping me!
Click to expand...

SOLUTION: The answer is to not use those drivers and just rely on the EFI driver.
Click to expand...

All of this assumes you have a MacBook of some sort, with Firewire and a Firewire cable to connect your MacBook to your Mac Pro. If your MacBook has Thunderbolt and no Firewire, you maybe able to use a thunderbolt to firewire adapter. It also assumes you have no OS installed on your Mac Pro, if you have any other OS installed on your Mac Pro, you may have trouble booting Sierra once you get it installed, if this is the case, I recommend setting up a new hard drive or partition with Disk Utility to install Sierra to, assuming you can boot, with video to the desktop of the Mac Pro, using the OS that is installed, after you install Sierra, in target disk mode, and the nVidia Web drivers, and turn on Remote Log In, boot the Mac Pro from the old working OS and open System Preferences->Startup Disk and choose the Sierra disk or partition and reboot.

You won't have an EFI driver on an unfleshed card.

Assuming you will be installing 10.12.4 and the nVidia Web Driver, boot the Mac Pro in target disk mode connected to your MacBook?, and install Seirra( 10.12.4 ) and the nVidia web driver. Boot Sierra from target disk mode on your on your MacBook, got System Preferences->Sharing and enable Remote Log in. Setup your networking, so your Mac Pro will connect to your router when you boot Sierra without a boot screen.

Boot your Mac Pro from the hard drive you installed, then on the MacBook ssh into you Mac Pro.

From the Terminal.app in your MacBook:
Code: 
ssh USER@MacPros.IP.Adress

Where USER is your admin account name, and MacPros.IP.Address is the IP Address of your Mac Pro on your network, not the IP address of you MacBook.

After you type you password for ssh, type:

Code: 
sudo nvram nvda_drv=1

Once again, you need your admin password:

Then:

Code: 
sudo shutdown -r now

When your Mac Pro reboots, you should have video from you unflashed card, when you reach the desktop.
+-
 
Last edited:
Hi All, I tried installing a 1050 ti card and booting into bootcamp but without success, card fan were spinning but no visual output to the monitor using hdmi connected to this new card. Couple hours of research done, try and error but still unable to use this new card, what am I missing out here?

Is the logic of plugging a new card into a new PC rig and assume it will use a generic display driver not right here?

I tried to install the nvidia windows x64 driver first but since the new card wasn't connected, it can't be installed.

Use case: Bootcamp Windows x64.
 
bloodwater90 said:
Hi All, I tried installing a 1050 ti card and booting into bootcamp but without success, card fan were spinning but no visual output to the monitor using hdmi connected to this new card. Couple hours of research done, try and error but still unable to use this new card, what am I missing out here?

Is the logic of plugging a new card into a new PC rig and assume it will use a generic display driver not right here?

I tried to install the nvidia windows x64 driver first but since the new card wasn't connected, it can't be installed.

Use case: Bootcamp Windows x64.
Click to expand...


Have you install Nvidia MacOs drivers yet, I have a Titan X Pascal working fine in MacOs/Windows 10 here is a video using Titan X in MacOs




Download the drivers for your 1050Ti here


http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/117854/en-us


download the drivers first then give your 1050 a try
 
bloodwater90 said:
So, even if I am gonna run windows in boot camp, i will need to go into MacOS and install the web driver?
Click to expand...

if you only running windows then you don't need to download Nvidia web drivers, If your just going to run windows then download Nvidia experience download the drivers for windows on your mac first then install the 1050Ti then it should work fine I have videos up on youtube
 
DearthnVader said:
All of this assumes you have a MacBook of some sort, with Firewire and a Firewire cable to connect your MacBook to your Mac Pro. If your MacBook has Thunderbolt and no Firewire, you maybe able to use a thunderbolt to firewire adapter. It also assumes you have no OS installed on your Mac Pro, if you have any other OS installed on your Mac Pro, you may have trouble booting Sierra once you get it installed, if this is the case, I recommend setting up a new hard drive or partition with Disk Utility to install Sierra to, assuming you can boot, with video to the desktop of the Mac Pro, using the OS that is installed, after you install Sierra, in target disk mode, and the nVidia Web drivers, and turn on Remote Log In, boot the Mac Pro from the old working OS and open System Preferences->Startup Disk and choose the Sierra disk or partition and reboot.

You won't have an EFI driver on an unfleshed card.

Assuming you will be installing 10.12.4 and the nVidia Web Driver, boot the Mac Pro in target disk mode connected to your MacBook?, and install Seirra( 10.12.4 ) and the nVidia web driver. Boot Sierra from target disk mode on your on your MacBook, got System Preferences->Sharing and enable Remote Log in. Setup your networking, so your Mac Pro will connect to your router when you boot Sierra without a boot screen.

Boot your Mac Pro from the hard drive you installed, then on the MacBook ssh into you Mac Pro.

From the Terminal.app in your MacBook:
Code: 
ssh USER@MacPros.IP.Adress

Where USER is your admin account name, and MacPros.IP.Address is the IP Address of your Mac Pro on your network, not the IP address of you MacBook.

After you type you password for ssh, type:

Code: 
sudo nvram nvda_drv=1

Once again, you need your admin password:

Then:

Code: 
sudo shutdown -r now

When your Mac Pro reboots, you should have video from you unflashed card, when you reach the desktop.
+-
Click to expand...


Thanks for this! I do have a MacBook and the mac pro is already installed with newest Sierra. So basically I got to use the Target disk mode to install the web driver on the mac pro and shh some flag?

My other two questions before got myself into these complicated process(To me really) is
1, This is a stupid one, but I forget and not sure the definition of boot screen. Do I have to have boot screen to use time machine restore? Or I can do it after I log into the Mac pro?

2, Except for the boot screen, is there any other benefit for getting the Titan flashed? Function wise? I don't mind manually update the driver or something like it.
 
skyline r34 said:
if you only running windows then you don't need to download Nvidia web drivers, If your just going to run windows then download Nvidia experience download the drivers for windows on your mac first then install the 1050Ti then it should work fine I have videos up on youtube
Click to expand...


This will probably mean that I gotten a lemon 1050 ti.

And will need to wait for more days to rma it.
 
If you're only running Windows please take note of two important things:

1. Keep Windows from auto-updating your Nvidia drivers. Windows always auto-updates to OLD drivers.

2. Only download and install the latest Nvidia driver-package for your Windows and card. Nvidia Experience is bloatware and not really needed.

nJoy your Windows!

Cheers
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Synchro3
Hps1 said:
Hello there,

Is it true that 5,1 Mac Pros are limited to three GPUs (no matter internal or external) if running Sierra?

I was planning on running four or eight 1080 TIs via external chassis but apparently there is some sort of software limitation.

If this is true, has anyone figured out what was altered between 10.11 and 10.12? Surely this can be "fixed".

Thanks
HP
Click to expand...

From memory, Tutor tested that and the limit was 5. 5 GPU, not 5 graphic cards.
 
lchenye said:
Thanks for this! I do have a MacBook and the mac pro is already installed with newest Sierra. So basically I got to use the Target disk mode to install the web driver on the mac pro and shh some flag?

My other two questions before got myself into these complicated process(To me really) is
1, This is a stupid one, but I forget and not sure the definition of boot screen. Do I have to have boot screen to use time machine restore? Or I can do it after I log into the Mac pro?

2, Except for the boot screen, is there any other benefit for getting the Titan flashed? Function wise? I don't mind manually update the driver or something like it.
Click to expand...

Too me, it's worth having an EFI rom for boot screen, otherwise you are unable to use the Option key to select a Startup disk, or use Recovery mode, or boot into Single User Mode.

If you already have Sierra installed, you should be able to use /Applications/Utilities/Migration Assistant.app to migrate your data from your MacBook to you Mac Pro. Over network or using the MacBook in Target Disk Mode.

Assuming you know the Admin Password, once you install the nVidia Drivers and set Remote Log in, you should be able to set nvda_drv 1 via SSH.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: irked, Synchro3 and m4v3r1ck
lchenye said:
2, Except for the boot screen, is there any other benefit for getting the Titan flashed? Function wise? I don't mind manually update the driver or something like it.
Click to expand...

Here is my list. These aren't all necessarily relevant specifically to the Titan though.
  • Proper listing of card model in OS X system information.
  • Full PCI 2.0 speed in every operating system (without EFI, the PCIe speed is cut in half for Windows and for older versions of OS X).
  • For Nvidia Maxwell and Pascal cards, the ability to boot into OS X and see the GUI without default Apple drivers loaded, and MUCH safer/easier to deal with Nvidia web driver updates.
  • Ability to install Windows in EFI mode instead of BIOS emulation mode, with related benefits such as faster drive access (AHCI mode), no weird hybrid partitions, support for more than 4 partitions, and support for partitions greater than 2TB in size.
  • Ability to use the 1,1 to 2,1 firmware upgrade utility.
  • Ability to use the 4,1 to 5,1 firmware upgrade utility.
  • Boot screens:
    • Ability to do a clean install of an operating system.
    • Selecting an operation system at boot time for dual-boot systems, or any time you insert a boot disk or USB thumb drive.
    • Ability to see in Safe Boot mode.
    • Ability to see in Single User mode.
    • Ability to see in Verbose mode.
    • Ability to see the password prompt for systems with the firmware password enabled.
    • Ability to see the password prompt for systems with Full Disk Encryption, such as Filevault.
    • Ability to see in any number of bootdisk-based utilities, such as AHT (Apple Hardware Test), MemTest86, CloneZilla, any number of Linux Live discs, etc.
  • There is also possibility that Mac EFI is one of the pieces needed to get audio out of the GPU, but there is conflicting information about whether it is really required or not, so I count this is a "maybe".
Some people act like the Maxwell/Pascal driver issue is overblown. That's only true if you never bump into any problems. If you do have a problem with a driver update, even just mistakenly doing something in the wrong order, it is very difficult to overcome unless you have another Mac or a spare old card with Mac EFI.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: h9826790, owbp, irked and 2 others
Hope it's ok I post this here, didn't want to open a new thread.


Anybody running two identical Nvidia Maxwell or Pascal cards in a cMP?

If so do you run FCPX? Any problems?
 
DearthnVader said:
Too me, it's worth having an EFI rom for boot screen, otherwise you are unable to use the Option key to select a Startup disk, or use Recovery mode, or boot into Single User Mode.

If you already have Sierra installed, you should be able to use /Applications/Utilities/Migration Assistant.app to migrate your data from your MacBook to you Mac Pro. Over network or using the MacBook in Target Disk Mode.

Assuming you know the Admin Password, once you install the nVidia Drivers and set Remote Log in, you should be able to set nvda_drv 1 via SSH.
Click to expand...
ActionableMango said:
Here is my list. These aren't all necessarily relevant specifically to the Titan though.
  • Proper listing of card model in OS X system information.
  • Full PCI 2.0 speed in every operating system (without EFI, the PCIe speed is cut in half for Windows and for older versions of OS X).
  • For Nvidia Maxwell and Pascal cards, the ability to boot into OS X and see the GUI without default Apple drivers loaded, and MUCH safer/easier to deal with Nvidia web driver updates.
  • Ability to install Windows in EFI mode instead of BIOS emulation mode, with related benefits such as faster drive access (AHCI mode), no weird hybrid partitions, support for more than 4 partitions, and support for partitions greater than 2TB in size.
  • Ability to use the 1,1 to 2,1 firmware upgrade utility.
  • Ability to use the 4,1 to 5,1 firmware upgrade utility.
  • Boot screens:
    • Ability to do a clean install of an operating system.
    • Selecting an operation system at boot time for dual-boot systems, or any time you insert a boot disk or USB thumb drive.
    • Ability to see in Safe Boot mode.
    • Ability to see in Single User mode.
    • Ability to see in Verbose mode.
    • Ability to see the password prompt for systems with the firmware password enabled.
    • Ability to see the password prompt for systems with Full Disk Encryption, such as Filevault.
    • Ability to see in any number of bootdisk-based utilities, such as AHT (Apple Hardware Test), MemTest86, CloneZilla, any number of Linux Live discs, etc.
  • There is also possibility that Mac EFI is one of the pieces needed to get audio out of the GPU, but there is conflicting information about whether it is really required or not, so I count this is a "maybe".
Some people act like the Maxwell/Pascal driver issue is overblown. That's only true if you never bump into any problems. If you do have a problem with a driver update, even just mistakenly doing something in the wrong order, it is very difficult to overcome unless you have another Mac or a spare old card with Mac EFI.
Click to expand...

I do have another spare apple old card, so I might still hold on the flash. But I just got my Mac pro today, with a pcie ssd as a startup disk. Somehow the startup time is way longer than it should. I believe it is because it is searching for the startup disk every time I turn it on, because there's a 30 seconds long pause before I even hear the chime, even I went to the system preference and choose the startup disk. Could this because of the lack of EFI? Somehow it just have to search for the boot drive every time?
 
hi I plan to buy used EVGA 980 Ti Hybrid What do you recommend for price range
got offer $300 good deal. Plan to build up ogpu or Mac Pro for my nephew
thanks
 
Last edited:
Just thought I'd alert everyone here. I just got off MacVidCards blog, and there was a message posted today by MVC that he is finishing up testing of the EFI flash for the GTX 1080 family of GPU's. He expects to start shipping product by the first of May:

http://www.macvidcards.com/blog

Lou
 
flowrider said:
Just thought I'd alert everyone here. I just got off MacVidCards blog, and there was a message posted today by MVC that he is finishing up testing of the EFI flash for the GTX 1080 family of GPU's. He expects to start shipping product by the first of May:

http://www.macvidcards.com/blog

Lou
Click to expand...

That's good news, or at least it will be, once Apple starts shipping Macs with PCIE slots and CPUs that can hit the fill rate.
 
Asgorath said:
4) What about SnowLeopard?

SnowLeopard will never, ever work with PC cards. Period. If you've been holding off updating, perhaps the fact that Mountain Lion works with PC cards will be enough to convince you to update.

No matter what, updating to the latest OS is the only way to get driver updates, and if you care about GPU performance then this alone should be enough motivation to stay current. Apple only supports the latest major OS version.
Click to expand...


i am sorry and new to this discussion but i have already used a AMD Radeon 6870 successuflly withouth any hack 10.6++ up to ElCapitan.

Now i am searching for a better card that supports SnowLeopard AND newer OsX because i still need some PowerpC Classic Support.

Somewhere i have read that also the 7950 works on SnowLeopard somone got it running along with a 8800GT i think; can anyone confirm this or suggest a good PC Graphic Card that is silent and would work with SnowLeopard withouth having to solder around the card? I am OK with injecting Kext or installing driver, as long i don't need to meddle with the card.
Buying a Mac-Version of 285 or 4870/5770 i would like to avoid ...

Thank you very much.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back