GTS 250 in 4,1 on 10.8.1

[thefredelement]

I think I may have overloaded myself on video card information trying to research and could use a little clarity.

I bought a used Mac pro that came with a ATI 4870 512MB video card - I have a few desktops across two screens and like to keep a lot of stuff open so my video memory was seemingly constantly maxed out.

I had an old PC video card - Nvidia GeoForce GTS 250 with 1GB of memory from an old custom PC, I got to reading around here and thought it was worth a shot to drop in and see what happens. There was no boot screen but happily enough the login screen came right on.

Now I'm noticing some animations are a slow (specifically in the mail app, when replying to emails in to their own window and when sending emails, when they fly up), they seem to stutter a bit.

The Luxmark benchmark test application shows an image of a room with a bunch of windows but it's extremely grainy and full of "noise."

Photoshop has acceleration enabled and seems to run fine. I fired up Age of Empires 3 and that seems to play also. About this Mac properly recognizes the card and Diablo 3 seems way better.

So I'm just wondering what's up with the animations in the mail app and the Luxmark app?

Also, would anyone know if it's possible to flash this card for full link speed and boot screens?

Thanks

 

[initialsBB]

So I'm just wondering what's up with the animations in the mail app and the Luxmark app?

I don't know about the mail app problem, but Luxmark benches take a few minutes to complete and it keeps rendering until the bench score window pops up !

 

[thefredelement]

I don't know about the mail app problem, but Luxmark benches take a few minutes to complete and it keeps rendering until the bench score window pops up !

I let it go through and the score is 142, which seems kind of really low (I know the GTS 250 is an older card) compared to the score results on the Luxmark page.

Update:

LuxBall HDR: 1038
Sala: 142
Room: 74

I guess that seems inline with the class of card the GTS 250 is, I'll try clearing all my caches, maybe that'll help the animations.

 

[CaptainChunk]

This may sound stupid, but you did download and install the drivers from NVIDIA's website, right?

 

[thefredelement]

This may sound stupid, but you did download and install the drivers from NVIDIA's website, right?

I hope that's not stupid because it's the first thing I thought of, their page says that the drivers aren't needed after 10.7

 

[Asgorath]

I hope that's not stupid because it's the first thing I thought of, their page says that the drivers aren't needed after 10.7

In order to make stock PC cards work with Lion, you absolutely need the drivers from NVIDIA's website. They only work out-of-the-box with Mountain Lion (10.8).

 

[jpine]

In order to make stock PC cards work with Lion, you absolutely need the drivers from NVIDIA's website. They only work out-of-the-box with Mountain Lion (10.8).

IF I understand the OP correctly, he's running 10.8

 

[thefredelement]

IF I understand the OP correctly, he's running 10.8

Yup, I'm on 10.8.

I cleared my user/system cache files and the mail animations seem much more "normal" so I think I'm all set. (I don't know if it was the cache clearing, disk repairing or 3 - 4 restarts, either way it's good)

I've been reading here and over at netkas.org and it seems these Nvidia's are a pain to flash so I'm just going to be happy with the bump over the stock ATI card for now until there's budget for a more modern card from Mvc's ebay store.

 

[CaptainChunk]

I've been reading here and over at netkas.org and it seems these Nvidia's are a pain to flash so I'm just going to be happy with the bump over the stock ATI card for now until there's budget for a more modern card from Mvc's ebay store.

Well, flashing is not hard... Soldering a big enough EEPROM chip to the card to support an EFI ROM is (you need special tools and know-how), and that's what MacVidCards specializes in.