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

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Dillo2 said:
I installed an EVGA GTX 660 Ti in my 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 and it works great. You will need to acquire two power cables just as you will for the GTX 570. Order the GTX 660 Ti with 2 Gb of RAM, otherwise, you will need to patch one of the binary files.

To get the card working with Premiere Pro, follow the instructions published at Smoke on the Water
Click to expand...

For powering two cards in a MAC PRO (3.1) e.g. Nvidia MAC 8800GT & EVGA PC GTX670-FTW see my post!

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1533504/
 
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I wanted to chime in with the 650 ti that I got back in December (as a result of this thread).

I have a 4,1 2009 mac pro 2 x 2.26, 14 gb, 10.8.2

I chose this particular 650ti model because it was supposed to be very quiet:

MSI nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition 1GB GDDR5 OC 2DVI/Mini HDMI PCI-Express Video Card N650TI PE 1GD5/OC

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009K1PY5Q

In spite of recommendations, I installed the 650 ti in slot 1 (the card is 2 pci slots wide) and moved my original gt 120 to slot 2 in case I needed a boot screen. (I in fact have used it quite a bit for other unrelated reasons, though of course I need to move the cable to the 120 in those cases.)

I actually had more trouble getting the 650 ti working in my windows 7 bootcamp installation than os x... (I installed the card originally before installing the windows driver so I had to pull it back out I think for that.)

So far I haven't really had any trouble with the card (cross fingers :) )
I just recently installed the CUDA driver for running einstein@home and it seems to be working fine.

At the moment I'm running nvidia drivers: 1.3.4.0 (304.00.05f02) and cudo driver 5.0.37.

thanks for all the info from this thread (and a few others). I never would have risked it without all the reports, but I didn't actually see a 650 ti listed in the "known to work" list at the start of this thread so you now have a success report for that.
 
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Dillo2 said:
I installed an EVGA GTX 660 Ti in my 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 and it works great. You will need to acquire two power cables just as you will for the GTX 570. Order the GTX 660 Ti with 2 Gb of RAM, otherwise, you will need to patch one of the binary files.

To get the card working with Premiere Pro, follow the instructions published at Smoke on the Water
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info dilo2! That smoke on the water blog is top notch.

I'm going with gtx 660 ti and will report back.
 
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Just wanted to add that I have a GTX 660 working in a 2008 Mac Pro. Fresh install of 10.8.2 and installed latest Nvidia drivers from their site before putting card in. Installed Cuda update and I think I enabled OpenCL. I'm not sure how to tell if it worked? I can run the unigine benchmark in OpenCL mode so I am assuming it worked. In cinebench I get a much less frame rate than I did with an ATI 5770 but this is the only program that seems to be affected and as stated in the original post is probably due to it being so old. X-plane runs like a champ in 64 bit at 60FPS (I have it locked to monitor refresh rate) on 2 20in cinema displays (3360x1050). In all I am very happy with this and do not miss the boot screen at all. Also I have display sleep and system sleep and everything seems to work. I actually had more problems with the Mac 5770 with the computer failing to wake from sleep and getting a kernel panic. ATI drivers were the only thing in the back trace.
One problem I did run into is I am running OS X on a RAID 0 on 2 old intel SSDs in the 2nd optical bay (Should probably upgrade to just 1 faster one), and windows cannot see this so I cannot choose it as a start up disk. I used to get around this on the boot screen. What I do is I select the OS X disk as the start up disk in mountain lion and installed BootChamp. Use boot champ to restart into windows (this does not change the startup disk setting) and in windows just select restart and it will boot into mac as long as you don't mess with the startup disk option in bootcamp while running windows. Installing updates in windows that have to restart can be a PITA as it restarts into Mac but its not that big of a problem. Sorry for the long post but I have seen previous posts with people having a problem with this. Also haven't really tried any games in Windows but the benchmarks seem to be just a little lower than they are on the Mac side for some reason. Thank you everyone here for all the info!
 
Another solution to the missing Boot screen, is to make a Recovery Partition on a USB stick. Then when you need the boot menu, press cmd-r to boot of the USB stick, and in there ESC out of the disk utility, and use the menu system to select the boot disk option.

This way you always have a "Boot Menu" even with non-EFI graphics cards, and you see such solutions as the Accelsior card which does not show up in the Apple Boot Menu:)
 
Killerbob said:
Another solution to the missing Boot screen, is to make a Recovery Partition on a USB stick. Then when you need the boot menu, press cmd-r to boot of the USB stick, and in there ESC out of the disk utility, and use the menu system to select the boot disk option.

This way you always have a "Boot Menu" even with non-EFI graphics cards, and you see such solutions as the Accelsior card which does not show up in the Apple Boot Menu:)
Click to expand...

Great idea!!! Trying that today!!!!!!! :cool:
 
Killerbob said:
Another solution to the missing Boot screen, is to make a Recovery Partition on a USB stick. Then when you need the boot menu, press cmd-r to boot of the USB stick, and in there ESC out of the disk utility, and use the menu system to select the boot disk option.

This way you always have a "Boot Menu" even with non-EFI graphics cards, and you see such solutions as the Accelsior card which does not show up in the Apple Boot Menu:)
Click to expand...

Ah yeah that will work too. I'm on a raid so have no recovery partition but I guess I could make one from my MacBook Pro.
 
Killerbob said:
You can download OSX Recovery Disk Assistant (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433), which allows you to create a bootable USB stick with the recovery partition.
Click to expand...

Yeah I meant I can't because you have to have an existing recovery partition on your OS X drive to create a USB one. You can't have that on a RAID. Also it diesnt have to be on a flash drive. If I have a recovery partition on my MacBook Pro I could the Mac Pro in target mode and put a recovery partition on any disk that is not RAID in the Mac Pro using carbon copy cloner. I have found it is easier to use than apples assistant which IIRC is only for flash drives. This is pretty off topic sorry guys.
 
funkahdafi said:
So.... what about the new GTX Titan card? Since it's also a Kepler card, can we assume it will work?
Click to expand...

No, Titan will not work (yet). We'll be keeping an eye on the NVIDIA drivers over the next couple of releases to see if that card gets enabled. From what I've seen, the Titan reviews are using release 314 drivers, while the Mac drivers from NVIDIA are still based on release 304. It's hard to get an exact correlation between the versions, but I'd be surprised if the Titan cards worked before the NVIDIA driver version was at least in the 314 range.

I'll update the OP with this info, to avoid confusion.
 
I'd sure like to see Chrome/NV updates to fix this hardware assist for video decoding bug. HardOCP now has some content on the main page that will auto-lock my MP just by visiting with Chrome... Firefox it is..
 
brentsg said:
I'd sure like to see Chrome/NV updates to fix this hardware assist for video decoding bug. HardOCP now has some content on the main page that will auto-lock my MP just by visiting with Chrome... Firefox it is..
Click to expand...

Do you have access to the 10.8.3 developer seed builds? I'm using Safari and obviously haven't seen this issue.
 
Asgorath said:
Do you have access to the 10.8.3 developer seed builds? I'm using Safari and obviously haven't seen this issue.
Click to expand...

No, I haven't used that.

I have a feeling that it's the NV driver, but perhaps they've implemented a workaround (i.e. shut down hw accel for certain misbehaving situations).

It just beach balls and that's that.
 
brentsg said:
No, I haven't used that.

I have a feeling that it's the NV driver, but perhaps they've implemented a workaround (i.e. shut down hw accel for certain misbehaving situations).

It just beach balls and that's that.
Click to expand...

I just downloaded Chrome on my dev seed system and gave it a whirl, and hardocp.com loads and runs just fine for me. I suspect it's already fixed in 10.8.3.
 
Asgorath said:
I just downloaded Chrome on my dev seed system and gave it a whirl, and hardocp.com loads and runs just fine for me. I suspect it's already fixed in 10.8.3.
Click to expand...

Would you mind trying a couple of random videos from CNN.com?

So you're simply using 10.8.3 with whatever driver is built in then? I'm a bit unclear how that interacts with drivers that NV posts.
 
brentsg said:
Would you mind trying a couple of random videos from CNN.com?

So you're simply using 10.8.3 with whatever driver is built in then? I'm a bit unclear how that interacts with drivers that NV posts.
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm using a developer seed build of 10.8.3 with the Apple driver. Typically NVIDIA will release a driver once the OS update is actually released, which might contain more improvements or bugfixes. I'll try CNN.com as well later today.
 
funkahdafi said:
This is a known issue. Seems to be related to hardware accelerated (GPU) video decoding in the browser, specifically webkit based browsers (Chrome, Safari).
Click to expand...

is this issue just with the gtx 660 or with all kepler gpu?

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Killerbob said:
Another solution to the missing Boot screen, is to make a Recovery Partition on a USB stick. Then when you need the boot menu, press cmd-r to boot of the USB stick, and in there ESC out of the disk utility, and use the menu system to select the boot disk option.

This way you always have a "Boot Menu" even with non-EFI graphics cards, and you see such solutions as the Accelsior card which does not show up in the Apple Boot Menu:)
Click to expand...

Im having trouble getting to the boot screen. I made the usb recovery disk assistance. I turn off the computer, turn it on, let it chime, press cmd and r hold it for a few seconds let go and it just opens up to the log in screen. am i suppose to do something else?
 
Pithism said:
is this issue just with the gtx 660 or with all kepler gpu?

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Im having trouble getting to the boot screen. I made the usb recovery disk assistance. I turn off the computer, turn it on, let it chime, press cmd and r hold it for a few seconds let go and it just opens up to the log in screen. am i suppose to do something else?
Click to expand...

Did you make the recovery disk from the same computer? If so it already has a recovery partition. Now you have 2. Maybe it's confused.
 
My OSX is on an Accelsior card, which is not refistered that early i. The boot process, and it starts up off the USB stick. I don't think it would be confused with a recovery partition somewhere else, rather your USB stick is not working correctly. Also, if you are using a BT keyboard that might cause issues.
 
Killerbob said:
My OSX is on an Accelsior card, which is not refistered that early i. The boot process, and it starts up off the USB stick. I don't think it would be confused with a recovery partition somewhere else, rather your USB stick is not working correctly. Also, if you are using a BT keyboard that might cause issues.
Click to expand...

You're right. I just tried to reproduce the problem I made up with 1 usb recovery and one on the hard drive and it booted the one on the hard drive. So yeah it is probably BT keyboard or bad USB stick. The BT keyboard thing is STUPID because I could use boot keys with BT on my powermac G5 and now with a mac pro I have to keep a wired keyboard nearby just in case. How do you like the Accelsior card? Also why don't you put the recovery partition on another drive in the computer instead of having a USB drive connected all the time? Im just wondering I'm sure you have a reason.
 
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I absolutely love the Accelsior card. With that upgrade and a good graphics card (GTX680), I see no reason for holding out for the 2013 MP. Especially with the ease of switching to newer graphics there no longer is an excuse for not doing it. The biggest one was the lack of the boot menu, and that's now resolved!

As for using a USB stick for the recovery partition, I do not really have any good reason, except I don't want to many installations of OSX to maintain.

With the lack of the boot screen, the issues of changing between bootcamp and OSX (using non-std. SSD/HDD solutions), I am happy to have a boot screen using the recovery partition.
 
Pithism said:
is this issue just with the gtx 660 or with all kepler gpu?

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Im having trouble getting to the boot screen. I made the usb recovery disk assistance. I turn off the computer, turn it on, let it chime, press cmd and r hold it for a few seconds let go and it just opens up to the log in screen. am i suppose to do something else?
Click to expand...

On a wireless keyboard there is a trick/rhythm to do it. My trick is as follows.
Press "alt or command-r or cmd-r-opt-p or whatever" a few time ahead of the chime, kind of warming up my keyboard, when I do hear the chime I do a quick press, release, re-press and hold. I'm sure the double stroke at the chime is the real trick but like i said, a rhythm.
 
ssls6 said:
On a wireless keyboard there is a trick/rhythm to do it. My trick is as follows.
Press "alt or command-r or cmd-r-opt-p or whatever" a few time ahead of the chime, kind of warming up my keyboard, when I do hear the chime I do a quick press, release, re-press and hold. I'm sure the double stroke at the chime is the real trick but like i said, a rhythm.
Click to expand...

"Slave to the rhythm..." ~ Grace Jones :D
 
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