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Frequently Asked Questions About NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Cards
- Thread starter Asgorath
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Why does it matter? There are several people who know where to find it, they can share their methods if they feel like it. They've all been very good about posting links as soon as beta drivers become available, so if and when they do show up, I'm sure you'll hear about it very quickly.
And the've not only posted the link, but they provide very uselful (testdrive) feedback about the betas for the less techie users on MR! See that as a free service as well! ;-)
I always just patiently wait for those great posts here on MR.
Cheers
Whee i
Where is this beautiful link?)))
Edit: I thought you meant El Cap driver
No prob! Just read the post #2275 by @Asgorath again! Someday the posters here will come to your rescue
Cheers
Question.
Can I have only the GT120 show up in OSX and then have the GTX980 just for Bootcamp? As far as I know if the web drivers are removed with the GTX980 installed Yosemite goes into an endless boot cycle. How do we get around this so that we can have a different graphics card for each OS?
Can I have only the GT120 show up in OSX and then have the GTX980 just for Bootcamp? As far as I know if the web drivers are removed with the GTX980 installed Yosemite goes into an endless boot cycle. How do we get around this so that we can have a different graphics card for each OS?
Couldn't you just not plug a monitor into the 980 under MacOS? How many monitors are you running, and the GT120 should have at least 2 DVI ports, right?
I have them plugged into same monitor. 980 on dp. 120 on dvi.
You can't currently boot into El Cap with the 980 installed otherwise you get endless boot. So I want see if it is possible to boot the OS with the GT120 working and without removing the GTX 980 card which I want to still work in Windows.
I'm not following you here; Without the 980 installed, you can install the web drivers appropriate for your system. Then install the 980, but plug the Monitor(s) only into the 120 and you should be fine. Once you boot into windows you can switch any monitors onto the 980. I'm curious though why you would not want the 980 working under the Mac environment?
I want the GT120 only for OSX. I want the 980 only for Windows. It's simple. In Windows I can disable the GT120 in Device Manager. OSX won't even boot if you have both cards but only want to use GT120 with native drivers. There must be a way to tell the OS to ignore the 980.
The stock Apple drivers will kernel panic if the 980 (or any other Maxwell board) is present. You should install the web drivers to avoid this panic (what you call the endless boot cycle). There is no way to tell the OS to ignore that card as far as I'm aware.
No, there's no way to tell MacOS to ignore it, but the driver being present will be the same one for the 120 as the 980. If you have nothing plugged into the 980 MacOS will effectively ignore it. You'll get better performance from both card with the web drivers; install them. Again, why would you not want to use a better card for both?
If you have noticed I am prepared for the possible eventuality that an Nvidia web driver won't be forthcoming. In that case I would use the Apple card with native drivers for OSX and another card for Windows. It's a shame that OSX can ignore a device when the driver for it isn't installed or that there is no option for that.
What makes you think there won't be an NVIDIA web driver available? NVIDIA has done a pretty damned good job of supporting/enabling people to use add-in cards, especially unofficial ones. There's obviously an issue with the stock drivers that is causing cards with an unsupported architecture (i.e. Maxwell) to cause a kernel panic. Is it really too much to ask to just install the web drivers to avoid the issues you're seeing?
Failing that, just unplug the card for OS X and swap it back in for Windows. Personally, I'm just using a GTX 980 with the web drivers and I've never been happier.
Rootless. The Nvidia Web Drivers are not Kext signed (that's why you have to disable it on Yosemite), and El Capitan won't allow 3rd party kexts without even bigger hacks. It's questionable if a big company like Nvidia really will encourage people to disable both kext signing and rootless thus infiltrating two big security measures just to install their drivers. Apple certainly won't like it, and since they don't care about people upgrading their legacy Macs (why should they when they can instead sell some disposable trash cans) it's quite doubtful that they'll change their policy.
In the past, Nvidia has always offered Web Drivers for new OS in the beta stage. This time they have not, which isnt a good sign...
Uhh, this doesn't match my experience at all. The NVIDIA web driver has been signed for quite some time now:
Code:
Contents> pwd
/System/Library/Extensions/GeForceWeb.kext/Contents
Contents> ls -l
total 16
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3058 Jun 30 17:28 Info.plist
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jun 30 18:10 MacOS/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 9 Jun 30 17:29 PkgInfo
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jun 30 18:10 _CodeSignature/I've been running the web driver on my laptop for a while now, I simply modify the installer to remove the platform check and I absolutely do not have kext-dev-mode enabled on that machine.
NVIDIA released beta web drivers for pre-release versions 10.10 only. This was a new thing for the Yosemite releases, it's not like they've been doing that for years and many versions of the OS. Perhaps they're just really busy with QA'ing all the respins that Apple is forcing them to do by releasing security updates for 3 major OS versions (10.8, 10.9 and 10.10) as well as all the development that's taking place for 10.11 as well. After all, they're implementing a whole new driver this time for Metal, it's not like this is just an incremental update to OpenGL and OpenCL like previous OS releases.
Personally, I think we'll see El Cap beta drivers soon, and am not worried about NVIDIA suddenly dropping support for their official add-in cards (and the unofficial support for all other cards as well).
Oh, you're totally right, sorry.
I was sure that the installer would also enable kext dev mode when modifying nvram, but it's just nvda_drv=1, just checked. I'm not sure a 3rd party installer with 3rd party code signing can overwrite Apple kexts though...
EDIT: I don't think Metal is the problem here, afaik Metal is already working with the standard Web Drivers.
I was sure that the installer would also enable kext dev mode when modifying nvram, but it's just nvda_drv=1, just checked. I'm not sure a 3rd party installer with 3rd party code signing can overwrite Apple kexts though...
EDIT: I don't think Metal is the problem here, afaik Metal is already working with the standard Web Drivers.
I hope so because all my apps work in El Cap. Only split view is not working on the GT120 in Public Beta. It was working in DP1.
The NVIDIA web driver does not overwrite any Apple kexts, that's the whole point of it being a separate set of binaries with the Web suffix. Metal is El Cap only, there are no El Cap web drivers, so it cannot be working?
All I'm saying is that a ton of people seem to be rushing to proclaim that the end is coming and NVIDIA will no longer support OS X via their web drivers. Given their recent history of providing excellent support and enabling new GPU architectures, this feels very premature. El Cap is still months away from being final, WWDC was only a month ago and we've only had a couple of DP builds. We'll see, I guess.
The web drivers are overwriting NVDAStartup.kext, presumable because the original one doesn't contain the logic to switch between both drivers depending on the nvram flag.
Metal is supported on GTX 4xx+ and I'm quite sure that I've read people reporting that they've successfully run the Metal test app on their GTX 4xx - GTX 7xx (non-Maxwell) card (don't have a source at hand though).
No one is claiming that there won't be any Web Drivers for El Capitan, but it isn't totally impossible that support will be dropped (at least until Apple decides to update their legacy drivers...)
I have news about Windows 10 and Bootcamp on Mac Pro machines with GT120 and a newer Gtx card.
Windows 10 will update components automatically and I have heard this cannot be disabled in Home and Pro editions. If you have a GT120 and a newer GTX card installed in cMP you must disable the GT120 in Device Manager. If you don't do this Win10 will install a much older Nvidia 9500 driver for the card which will disable your newer card. It will also mess up your GeForce Experience app. You should disable the older card anyway. It serves no point in Windows.
Windows 10 will update components automatically and I have heard this cannot be disabled in Home and Pro editions. If you have a GT120 and a newer GTX card installed in cMP you must disable the GT120 in Device Manager. If you don't do this Win10 will install a much older Nvidia 9500 driver for the card which will disable your newer card. It will also mess up your GeForce Experience app. You should disable the older card anyway. It serves no point in Windows.
I might be wrong but I don't think native Maxwell driver will come to OSX.
Nvidia has become a competitor to Apple in the mobile and automotive sector. Their products are powering phones, cars and Steam consoles running Android and Linux. Apple has to be competitive in those sectors it can't be giving money to a competitor. So no Nvidia chips in Apple computers.
That means AMD Fiji/Fury will likely be the GPU in all top Macs. The device ID is already in the drivers right? If so I'm going to get a Radeon Fury Nano as soon as it is confirmed to work.
Nvidia has become a competitor to Apple in the mobile and automotive sector. Their products are powering phones, cars and Steam consoles running Android and Linux. Apple has to be competitive in those sectors it can't be giving money to a competitor. So no Nvidia chips in Apple computers.
That means AMD Fiji/Fury will likely be the GPU in all top Macs. The device ID is already in the drivers right? If so I'm going to get a Radeon Fury Nano as soon as it is confirmed to work.
AMD and Intel can also be found in competitive products, especially laptops. Personally I don't think that has anything to do with the lack of NVIDIA in the current generation of products. Best of luck to you if you decide to switch to AMD, but let's try and keep this thread on topic (i.e. discussing NVIDIA cards and their web drivers).
Edit: Note that I'm currently unable to edit the OP of this thread, I've reported it to ask the moderators for help with that.
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Looks like an El Capitan beta driver is now available:
http://us.download.nvidia.com/OH74WaRQJqEYOCnaqXNdHsnFt4J8zQnN/WebDriver-346.03.01b06.pkg
http://us.download.nvidia.com/OH74WaRQJqEYOCnaqXNdHsnFt4J8zQnN/WebDriver-346.03.01b06.pkg
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