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Frequently Asked Questions About NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Cards
- Thread starter Asgorath
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So I have searched through, but too many pages.
I have my GTX PC card working, but I am thinking of using my original card to get my boot screen.
Do I have to set this as a default for bootcamp? Or will it just show.
I have my GTX PC card working, but I am thinking of using my original card to get my boot screen.
Do I have to set this as a default for bootcamp? Or will it just show.
So stuck in my Radeon 2600 XT and the bootcamp menu shows on that and when OSX fires up my other screen is the main one.
GeForce GTX 970: Correcting the specs
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation
Various GTX 970 owners had observed that the GTX 970 was prone to topping out its reported VRAM allocation at 3.5GB rather than 4GB.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation
Various GTX 970 owners had observed that the GTX 970 was prone to topping out its reported VRAM allocation at 3.5GB rather than 4GB.
GTX 960 Installed
Mac Pro 4.1 Early 2009 2x Quad Core 2.26.
I managed to Install Asus GTX 960 to Yosemite without any major problems. I have old GT 120 in slot 1 and new in slot 2. used 1 6 pin cable for extra power.
Only problem seems be that Safari seems to be flickering oddly on a screen which is attached to GT 120. Other screen works fine. Problematic screen is 24" Apple LED Cinema Display. Any ideas how to fix that?
Mac Pro 4.1 Early 2009 2x Quad Core 2.26.
I managed to Install Asus GTX 960 to Yosemite without any major problems. I have old GT 120 in slot 1 and new in slot 2. used 1 6 pin cable for extra power.
Only problem seems be that Safari seems to be flickering oddly on a screen which is attached to GT 120. Other screen works fine. Problematic screen is 24" Apple LED Cinema Display. Any ideas how to fix that?
Same problem trying to use a 660Ti and original 8800GT (for the boot screen and second monitor) in my Early 2008 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core running 10.10.2. The screen would flicker in Safari and Messages, but was fine with Chrome. My 8800 seems to have recently lost the ability to run in parallel with the 660Ti (or drive 2 monitors on its own), so I am now just using the 660Ti and booting into windows via QuickBoot. No flickering with the single card! Could not find a solution or any additional info on the flickering... the problem did not exist in Mavericks.
I just noticed something interesting regarding Nvidia web drivers. I have a MP 4,1 and a (flashed) mac GTX 680. For quite a while now, I've been experiencing problems with Silverlight and Netflix/Prime streaming. Whenever going full screen on these services, video gets choppy and unwatchable using Firefox and sometimes even Safari. There are also random flickers (mentioned above) in Firefox. Highly annoying.
However, after updating to 10.10.2, the full screen problems went away and also the random flickering hasn't happened yet. Well it wasn't until I switched spaces and saw that the Nvidia drivers needed updated I realized I was using native OSX drivers for my 680. I updated the drivers and the problems returned. Admittedly, this took me a lot longer to troubleshoot than what I'm writing, but eventually I switched back to OSX drivers and no more flickering or choppy full screen.
Hopefully this will help someone else down the road, but for now I'm sticking with the OSX drivers as there seems to be something a bit buggy about the web drivers. The speed or optimization I'd be gaining by using the web drivers (for me) are negligible compared to what I'm losing in real world. I understand many folks need the web drivers to drive unflashed or bleeding edge cards, so do as you need/like. I just thought I'd offer up this little tidbit of info to anyone experiencing similar problems.
However, after updating to 10.10.2, the full screen problems went away and also the random flickering hasn't happened yet. Well it wasn't until I switched spaces and saw that the Nvidia drivers needed updated I realized I was using native OSX drivers for my 680. I updated the drivers and the problems returned. Admittedly, this took me a lot longer to troubleshoot than what I'm writing, but eventually I switched back to OSX drivers and no more flickering or choppy full screen.
Hopefully this will help someone else down the road, but for now I'm sticking with the OSX drivers as there seems to be something a bit buggy about the web drivers. The speed or optimization I'd be gaining by using the web drivers (for me) are negligible compared to what I'm losing in real world. I understand many folks need the web drivers to drive unflashed or bleeding edge cards, so do as you need/like. I just thought I'd offer up this little tidbit of info to anyone experiencing similar problems.
Guys. I've just made a big mistake and I need help.
I bought a new GTX 970 and have been using it happly for the last 2 weeks. The problem is that I forgot about the web drivers and since I have 3 different boot drives on my machine, I selected the one with mavericks installed! Now, I can't obviously boot. My working boot drive is the one with yosemite and it was beautifully working.
What are my options? I do have a laptop with mavericks installed. is there a way to blind boot and select the right boot drive? Any way to remote change via terminal? Even a firewire/target disk mode?
Any help is really really appreciated. I really dont want to open it to place my old ATI 5770.
I bought a new GTX 970 and have been using it happly for the last 2 weeks. The problem is that I forgot about the web drivers and since I have 3 different boot drives on my machine, I selected the one with mavericks installed! Now, I can't obviously boot. My working boot drive is the one with yosemite and it was beautifully working.
What are my options? I do have a laptop with mavericks installed. is there a way to blind boot and select the right boot drive? Any way to remote change via terminal? Even a firewire/target disk mode?
Any help is really really appreciated. I really dont want to open it to place my old ATI 5770.
On old Macs with SCSI disks, you could press '0' thru '6' to select a specific SCSI target to boot from, but I don't see an equivalent capability listed for Intel-based Macs. Too bad, it would be a time saver here.
AFAIK, without opening it up, your best bet is to use the Mavericks laptop to create a Yosemite boot DVD or USB stick (Google for instructions on how to do this). You can then press 'C' to boot from the optical drive or the USB stick... though I think it might only boot from USB if no optical drive is present.
good luck!!
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That really will be the cleanest way to fix this, especially given how the base OS does not work with the new GPU at all.
Shouldn't the 10.10 built-in driver work with Maxwells enough to login? 10.10 includes 343.01.
MacPro1,1 with dual EVGA GeForce GT 610 1GB
I have a MacPro1,1 (2006) which was running OS X 10.7.5 with two Apple-supplied Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT. One of them is now broken, so I upgraded the machine to OS X 10.9.5 using the modified boot.efi and installed an EVGA GeForce GT 610 1 GB, which worked perfectly fine right away.
Then, I installed a second EVGA GeForce GT 610 1 GB (because I want the Mac Pro to drive more than two displays), and that's where the troubles started: with two graphics cards installed, only one would actually produce video output. Which one was working varied across reboots. Sometimes, the working one only operated in a basic video mode with 800x600 pixels.
I've tried both the Apple drivers and the Nvidia web drivers, but that made no difference.
It seems like OS X does not want to run multiple unofficially-supported GPUs simultaneously. I can use one GT 610 along with the Apple-supplied 7300, but the latter does not have a 10.9 driver, so it can only drive one screen and lacks hardware acceleration (making the GUI almost unusable).
The only mention of OS X not recognizing screens connected to a second GPU that I found was on InsanelyMac:
Has anyone successfully used multiple unsupported graphics card in an (unsupported) Mac Pro?
I have a MacPro1,1 (2006) which was running OS X 10.7.5 with two Apple-supplied Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT. One of them is now broken, so I upgraded the machine to OS X 10.9.5 using the modified boot.efi and installed an EVGA GeForce GT 610 1 GB, which worked perfectly fine right away.
Then, I installed a second EVGA GeForce GT 610 1 GB (because I want the Mac Pro to drive more than two displays), and that's where the troubles started: with two graphics cards installed, only one would actually produce video output. Which one was working varied across reboots. Sometimes, the working one only operated in a basic video mode with 800x600 pixels.
I've tried both the Apple drivers and the Nvidia web drivers, but that made no difference.
It seems like OS X does not want to run multiple unofficially-supported GPUs simultaneously. I can use one GT 610 along with the Apple-supplied 7300, but the latter does not have a 10.9 driver, so it can only drive one screen and lacks hardware acceleration (making the GUI almost unusable).
The only mention of OS X not recognizing screens connected to a second GPU that I found was on InsanelyMac:
So it is possible that OS X has a whitelist of machine models which may utilize two GPUs.
Has anyone successfully used multiple unsupported graphics card in an (unsupported) Mac Pro?
Giving up on non-EFI cards
I finally got tired of fighting the non-EFI cards. I have been working on a friend's MP3,1 off and on, and just couldn't get something that worked reliably. I had an EVGA GTX 650 that was close, but would seem to crash the machine when unloading Apples' Nvidia driver (web version had different issues), causing panics during shutdown or reboot.
For my money, I think the best option going is to get one of the flashable GTX 680 cards. They're not outrageously priced on eBay right now (~US$150) and very easy to flash. I flashed an MSI GTX 680 for my friend, and it's fantastic. Not only is the card plenty fast, it's REALLY nice to have boot/shutdown screens, and have it be 100% solid, with no crashes or weirdness using Apple's native driver. OpenCL works fine and accelerates FCPX rendering nicely.
Bottom line: if you want a seamless and stable solution, flash a GTX 680. For anyone not familiar with this, there's a great thread at:
Confirmed and Possible Flashable GTX 680 Models
Good luck!
I finally got tired of fighting the non-EFI cards. I have been working on a friend's MP3,1 off and on, and just couldn't get something that worked reliably. I had an EVGA GTX 650 that was close, but would seem to crash the machine when unloading Apples' Nvidia driver (web version had different issues), causing panics during shutdown or reboot.
For my money, I think the best option going is to get one of the flashable GTX 680 cards. They're not outrageously priced on eBay right now (~US$150) and very easy to flash. I flashed an MSI GTX 680 for my friend, and it's fantastic. Not only is the card plenty fast, it's REALLY nice to have boot/shutdown screens, and have it be 100% solid, with no crashes or weirdness using Apple's native driver. OpenCL works fine and accelerates FCPX rendering nicely.
Bottom line: if you want a seamless and stable solution, flash a GTX 680. For anyone not familiar with this, there's a great thread at:
Confirmed and Possible Flashable GTX 680 Models
Good luck!
Just used my MacBook Pro connected to my 2006 Mac Pro tower via FireWire and the tower in target mode and was able to boot off the tower's drive. Keep in mind some commands and file moving/copying must be done in this mode because they only appear to be copied or moved when just using the target disk as an additional drive rather than a boot drive.
Also I was able to get out of black screen mode using screen share and toggle back to web driver for my GTX 970.
My woes were caused by 10.10.2 wiping out my boot.efi and needing a new web driver but over a 2 day span target disk and screen share saved my bacon.
That's right, I had two nvidia 570, and neither worked with the web driver, only the apple driver.
So I bought a nvidia 970, and it work fine. At 2.5GT/s in my Mac Pro 3,1.
Install Nvidia web drivers first, reboot to make sure they are working. Power down, slot in your gtx560ti, attach your 6 pin connectors and power up.
You won't see anything until boot screen.
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Alright thanks for the steps.... Now I have a separate issue maybe I can reinstall lion fresh again and do what you say, but I was just trying to install mavericks on it so I used that ssoft terminal program to make the usb flash mavericks install for the 1,1 machine and and it did it booted right up and I started the install and I left right away so not sure when I got this error: Error I got said something like "install failed the software failed on this machine" had a yellow explanation point, something like that so I shut down the mac pro.
What you guys think is it because of the 7300gt 256mb card in it currently,or need to redo the ssoft flash drive? Thanks
Not anything to do with 7300, but you should go post questions in the thread about that topic.
The first two (2) pages of the Mac Pro section have 2 or 3 threads about running an OS after Lion on your machine.
You are like Dorothy in OZ. You've already got the Ruby Slippers, you just have to click your heels together.
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