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

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So this is my first OSX update while using a GTX680, so I wonder what I should do?

I read I should wait for nVidia to release new drivers as well, including the CUDA drivers, and then update to 10.8.3. But now I see that some are updating immediately. What's right?
 
Killerbob said:
So this is my first OSX update while using a GTX680, so I wonder what I should do?

I read I should wait for nVidia to release new drivers as well, including the CUDA drivers, and then update to 10.8.3. But now I see that some are updating immediately. What's right?
Click to expand...

Now that the stock Apple drivers will make your card work, it's generally fine to update straight away. In this case, 10.8.3 has 304.10.65f03 which should be newer (and hopefully better) than the NVIDIA version 304.00.05f02 for 10.8.2. As always, we expect NVIDIA to release a driver for 10.8.3 as well fairly soon anyway.

The main reason to hold off upgrading in the past was when the stock Apple drivers didn't support the GPU you were using, which meant updating involved switching to an EFI card and so on.

I just updated to 10.8.3 and my 680 is running fine as expected.
 
Killerbob said:
So this is my first OSX update while using a GTX680, so I wonder what I should do?
Click to expand...

Just let the die-hard tweakers update to 10.8.3 and hold your horses for a while! Just sit back and relax to first add up the number of satisfied updates regarding your hardware setup!

Just my 2c! ;-)

I read I should wait for nVidia to release new drivers as well, including the CUDA drivers, and then update to 10.8.3. But now I see that some are updating immediately. What's right?
Click to expand...

Goodluck with your choise here and Cheers mate!
Greetings
 
10.8.3 Final with 304.10.65f03 working fine with GTX670 & GTX680

I have the final version of 10.8.3 and all seems well with GTX670 & GTX680.

4GB of VRAM shows up, cards have OpenCl and CUDA works for CUDA-Z. It does say that update is needed but it is working as far as I can tell.

Cards self init but are running at PCIE 1.0 speeds in a 3,1. Will try moving drive to 4,1 and see what happens.

570/580 still perfect
 
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"Cards self init "

means they are not inited by EFI.

That is what this thread is about, Nvidia drivers that self init the card and make it work once it reaches desktop.
 
I am wondering if the new 304.10.65f03 drivers that come with 10.8.3 fix some of the issues people were having, like Chrome crashing the whole machine on hardware accelerated playback of certain videos, or the issue with virtual machines in Parallels/VMware acting up.

Now that these are officially "blessed" drivers, I would suspect there was some kind of quality control and bug hunting before they pushed them into 10.8.3.
 
funkahdafi said:
I am wondering if the new 304.10.65f03 drivers that come with 10.8.3 fix some of the issues people were having
Click to expand...

Updated just now, everything works fine. Can't yet comment on Chrome crashing or not, but it does seem to have sorted out a problem where some internet videos would have slight flickering (looked like flashing black frames). Can't benchmark OpenCL as Luxmark won't run with my GT610 alongside the GTX570... I'm guessing there is no need to hack the 2GB VRAM limit for OpenCL anymore, but I can't check and I'm too lazy to pull the GT610 out.
 
Just swapped my 4870 for a EVGA GTX 670 2gb. I have a 2009 mac pro quad core 2.66ghz. Installation in slot 1 didn't work. slot 2 no problem.

Luxmark went from 245 to 1203 :) Call of Duty is to scary now
 
Nice man in a van just brought the 660 ti to my door. It went in very sweetly. Fiddliest bit was plugging the power cables into the mother board.

Its quite an improvement over the previous 2600XT!

Guess I'll wait for a bit before upgrading to the latest Mountain Lion version.

Once again, thanks very much Asgorath for all of the work that has gone into this thread.
 
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Neanderphil said:
I can confirm that 10.8.3 fixes the monitor sleep issue (monitor backlight remaining on during sleep) I had been experiencing with my EVGA 660TI FTW Signature 2 and the latest NVIDIA drivers in 10.8.2.
Click to expand...

Very glad to hear this, I have an EVGA GTX 670 that refuses to sleep the back light on the main display (all the others are fine). It's not been critical since my monitor seems to have a safety catch to prevent burn in and cuts itself out after a long enough period with no changes, but still really annoying when all the monitors go dark, then the center one pops back on for a while. Cheers!
 
Luxmark no longer works. How to test OpenCL?

Odd .. since updating to 10.8.3 and the new CUDA drivers, the Luxmark doesn't seem to work anymore.

Anyone has any ideas?
 
Looking for clarification: It sounds like from some posts above that 10.8.3 includes a NVIDIA driver that is more recent than the current driver served by NVIDIA themselves. Does this mean we shouldn't need to get a driver directly from NVIDIA for best performance (well, until nvidia wants to update and apple doesn't want to push it as part of a system update anyway...) or will updating to 10.8.3 kick the system down to the (historically) lower performing driver and we'll have to wait for an update from NVIDIA.

To clarify my clarification request: this is the graphics driver I'm referring to, not the CUDA driver which is linked above (thanks for that!) and still appears to be NVIDIA only, not bundled in.
 
^^^^I have updated to 10.8.3 and have also the updated Cuda driver. I have a Gigabyte GTX570 modified with the MacVidCards EFI. LuxMark still works. The scores, however, are a fraction lower on 10.8.3 with LuxMark and the Unigine tests.

Lou
 
Well, it seems at least VMware have fixed the bug with crashing VMs with a new update.

http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2013/03/an-abundance-of-threes.html

Now let's see what Parallels comes up with. My guess is the bug fix is actually the new nVidia driver that's in 10.8.3.

EDIT:

Actually, reading that blog article again it seems that the bug that was causing VMs to crash was really in the older nVidia drivers. It's not a bug fix from VMware, it's a bug fix by nVidia. So Parallels should benefit from this as well.
 
2.5 or 5 GiB/s with 10.8.3 driver?

Can anyone on 10.8.3 with a non EFI GTX card test, whether the card is running on 2.5 or 5 GiB/s? You can check with Cuda-Z (http://cuda-z.sourceforge.net).

On 10.8.2 the Apple driver runs on 2.5 GiB/s, while the NVIDIA driver, although having lower version number, runs on 5 GiB/s.
 
ima747 said:
Does this mean we shouldn't need to get a driver directly from NVIDIA for best performance (well, until nvidia wants to update and apple doesn't want to push it as part of a system update anyway...) or will updating to 10.8.3 kick the system down to the (historically) lower performing driver and we'll have to wait for an update from NVIDIA.
Click to expand...

Probably no one will know, until NVIDIA posts a new driver for 10.8.3. ;)

I only can speak about 10.8.2. Having a non-EFI GTX 570 I initially stick with the Apple 10.8.2 NViDIA driver because it had a higher version number that the NVIDIA driver. Later I heard rumors about the recent NVIDIA drivers running cards at 5 GiB/s.
Thus installed the NVIDIA driver and low an behold the cards PCIe connection suddenly jumped from 2.5 GiB/s to 5 GiB/s. :D
 
As some may remember, I was having problems with my GTX 470 when using Final Cut Pro X and Google Earth 7 on my MP 3,1 running 10.8.2. FCP X would either crash or completely freeze up the computer requiring me to reboot. Google Earth 7 would completely freeze the computer also.

Well, good news, I am now stable with FCP X since the 10.8.3. update.

This is the error that I no longer get in Console.
Oct 31 15:55:14 my-name-mac-pro-2 kernel[0]: NVDA: Unable to use shared channel!
Oct 31 15:55:14 my-name-mac-pro-2 kernel[0]: NVDA: Calling glrKillClient for task 0xffffff802eb4d1a8
Click to expand...

Hopefully, this is resolved but I'll keep testing to be sure.

Now, Google Earth 7 is a different story. GE still completely freezes the computer. I don't really care so much about GE because it is not an important app for me. I just uninstalled GE and called it a day. Perhaps, I will try again when the official Nvidia drivers are released.

Here are the errors that I get in the Console for Google Earth 7.
3/16/13 11:27:31.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x8 = Fifo: Watchdog Timeout Error
3/16/13 11:27:31.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x1f = Fifo: MMU Error
3/16/13 11:27:31.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x1f = Fifo: MMU Error
3/16/13 11:27:31.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x1f = Fifo: MMU Error
3/16/13 11:27:31.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x1f = Fifo: MMU Error
3/16/13 11:27:31.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x1f = Fifo: MMU Error
3/16/13 11:27:31.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x1f = Fifo: MMU Error
3/16/13 11:27:31.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error
3/16/13 11:27:52.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel timeout!
3/16/13 11:27:52.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x20 = PBDMA Error
3/16/13 11:27:52.000 PM kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error
Click to expand...
 
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