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

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krisosha said:
Just to clarify, if you have two os's on your mac pro with no boot screns, rather then booting into the os and switching like that, there's nothing stoping you from doing it blind right?

I mean hold apple key for 15 seconds after startup, wait 5 seconds, push right arrow, push enter?
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That will work as long as you know which one will come up as "chosen" (last one chosen in bootcamp is where it starts) and how many clicks to right or left to get to one you want.

Between 6 drives I will frequently have 4 or 5 choices, especially as 10.8 and later also include an EFI recovery portion which doubles choices when 10.8 and later is one of choices. If you only have 2 or 3 choices a lot easier.
 
krisosha said:
Just to clarify, if you have two os's on your mac pro with no boot screns, rather then booting into the os and switching like that, there's nothing stoping you from doing it blind right?

I mean hold apple key for 15 seconds after startup, wait 5 seconds, push right arrow, push enter?
Click to expand...

When I use the ALT key (PC keyboard), my MP does a lot of extra polling or something because it takes longer to get to that screen then it does to actually boot up using an SSD. So for me, even though I do have boot screens, it's actually about the same speed or possibly even faster to simply boot up and switch there.

But not having a boot screens is more than just not being able to see the OS switcher. For example, you won't have PCIE2.0 speeds in many cases. Also, you can't see anything at boot up. How will you get to the Recovery Partition in event of OS failure? Will the recovery partition even init the card? Does the AHT init the card? You won't be able to use verbose mode during bootup for troubleshooting.

So yes, for the most part it is fine in daily use but it could also bite you in the ass some day.
 
My Nvidia GTX 570 arrived today:

1p4.png


Haven't had a chance to run too many tests but editor photos is soooo much smoother and Portal 2 runs amazingly. The install was simple, simply plopped the card in and it worked.
 
Is it just me, or does it seem like putting anything faster than a 570 in a mac pro 1.1 is a bit of a waste because of the cpu bottleneck.

Will you really be able to get that much extra performance to justify the purchase of a 660ti/760ti over something like a 570? It feels abit to me like the xeon 5150 will bottleneck it abit.

Can someone confirm/deny this? what would be the fastest card you could chuck in a mac pro without bottlenecking the shiat out of it.
 
krisosha said:
Is it just me, or does it seem like putting anything faster than a 570 in a mac pro 1.1 is a bit of a waste because of the cpu bottleneck.

Will you really be able to get that much extra performance to justify the purchase of a 660ti/760ti over something like a 570? It feels abit to me like the xeon 5150 will bottleneck it abit.

Can someone confirm/deny this? what would be the fastest card you could chuck in a mac pro without bottlenecking the shiat out of it.
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Barefeats did a shootout of graphics cards on the MP 1,1 and found that the 5770 was about the most you could take advantage of. The 5870 for example was barely any different.

However, it may depend on what kind of application you are using Barefeats showed that games didn't differ much, but IIRC there was also an OpenCL application that showed quite an improvement. I suppose it makes sense that a GPGPU-type application wouldn't be nearly as CPU bound as a game, so if you want to run a CUDA-heavy app you might indeed see better performance out of the faster cards in your list.
 
I know this isn't helpful at all, but -- I just don't understand the concern, unless your slots are full.

My machine came with a low-level graphics card (GT 120?), and when I got a more powerful one (5870 later replaced c/570), I left the old card in there.

It runs the main display, leaving the big card for compute and second display (a projector in my case).

So, not having a boot screen for an add-on card means nothing at all to me. Am I that unusual in this regard?
 
is a 'EVGA Nvidia GTX550Ti 1GB' card a good option for a mac pro 3.1?
or are there better cards at the price point (the EVGA GTX550Ti is on sale at £70ish in the UK at the mo)

was looking at the GTX 640 (and maybe the GTX 650 if i see it on sale) but i understand they require OSX10.8 & im using OSX10.7.5 at the mo i can upgrade if needed.

also are there any second hand options (older cards) that are relay worth looking at?

im relay new to this so all help&tips are welcome and wanted

Liam Taylor

edit-
is a GTX 560 a better option ?
 
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Finally added a link for the 10.8.4 driver, hadn't realized it wasn't there yet. As for the card list, I think it's safe to say that basically all Fermi generation cards and beyond will work, assuming you have the latest OS. There might be a certain minimum driver version required for bleeding-edge cards (e.g. GTX TITAN or 780) as a general rule of thumb, but given what we've seen I think it's a safe bet that the drivers will add support for newer models in a reasonable amount of time. Assuming you're running the latest version of the OS, that is.
 
I have a question: If I use 2 GPUs, one per screen, how will the graphical rendering work? If I have an application running on the secondary screen powered by the Radeon 2600, will the application get its graphical rendering from the 2600 instead of having the GTX 650 Ti Boost (on main screen) power it? What if it's half and half?
 
brentsg said:
I thought that I had read comments suggesting that Titan performance was crippled in OSX.
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There's currently no way to unlock the higher level of double-precision math performance, since that requires a control panel setting under Windows. Aside from that, the card seems to run fine as far as I can tell.
 
Does anyone see a reason why a PNY GTX 650 2Gb GPU (http://www3.pny.com/GTX-650-2048MB-PCIe-P3406C506.aspx) would not be a reasonable and problem free choice for a MP 3.1 with 8Gb RAM? (10.8.4 with NVidia 8800GT currently in place)TDP lists 64w. I have 2 SATA HDs, the second running Win7 for bootcamp. Your thoughts, sage gurus? :D

Edit: Mainly improved game performance is my goal, though I run CS6 and Cinema 4D in a hobby capacity
 
^^^^In a 3,1 Mac Pro a GTX card will not run at the full PCIe 5.0 GT/s speed it will run at 2.5 GT/s. Otherwise it should work with OS 10.8.3 or later OOB. But, of course - No Boot Screen.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
^^^^In a 3,1 Mac Pro a GTX card will not run at the full PCIe 5.0 GT/s speed it will run at 2.5 GT/s. Otherwise it should work with OS 10.8.3 or later OOB. But, of course - No Boot Screen.

Lou
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That I do know, (about the PCIe speed) in addition in Bootcamp it will only run at 1.5 GT/s I believe, but I have read that the slowdown is nominal. So 10.8.4 stock drivers are fine OOTB?
 
Thanks for the expeditious response, Flow! :D

I have never DLed the nV retail drivers before; would you use the freeBSD version, since the pulldown does not give a Mac option?

Edit: Also, in the Stock 10.8.4 drivers, are CUDA drivers built into that, or should those be loaded in addition? I see new ones of those on 8/13
 
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^^^^Not sure I understand? The Nvidia Driver pull-down gives you two choices:

Nvidia Web Driver
OS X Default Driver

If you want to change drivers, you pull the pull-down and select the driver you want to use. If you change, a restart is necessary. This can also be accomplished in System Preferences with the Nvidia Driver Manager. Also, the Nvidia driver software will sense if the Web driver installed is not compatible with the OS, and will default to the Mac OS Driver.

With Cuda installed, it works, when necessary, by default.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
^^^^Not sure I understand? The Nvidia Driver pull-down gives you two choices:

Nvidia Web Driver
OS X Default Driver

If you want to change drivers, you pull the pull-down and select the driver you want to use. If you change, a restart is necessary. This can also be accomplished in System Preferences with the Nvidia Driver Manager. Also, the Nvidia driver software will sense if the Web driver installed is not compatible with the OS, and will default to the Mac OS Driver.

With Cuda installed, it works, when necessary, by default.

Lou
Click to expand...

Sorry, perhaps I was unclear. I mean from your link, the downloads on NVidia's site; the OS choice does not offer OSX at all, just windows, Linux or FreeBSD. Cool to know you can choose which driver to use once installed though
 
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