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GTX 570/580 in MacPro2,1?

5

5050

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 28, 2009
180
2
Tesselator started a relevant thread here regarding the GTX 570 in a MacPro1,1 system:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1583383/

So I guess we know that the GTX 570 will run in a MacPro1,1. My question is what are the requirements to run a GTX 570 in a MacPro2,1?

OS X Lion minimum? Additional power required? Any workarounds needed, or Lion drivers should support the card? What about OpenCL, OpenGL support? Anything else I'm missing?

Also, Macvidcards offers the GTX 570/580 but states MacPro3,1 or higher is required. If Lion can be installed on a MacPro1,1 system, why would a MacPro3,1 system be the minimum requirement?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-GTX-...114?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item35c6aea1b2

Thanks!
 
Last edited:
2,1 is 1,1 with newer firmware. Only differences firmware-wise are microcode for few more CPUs and newer SMC version. That's all.
All limitations of 1,1 are also valid for 2,1.

Read Tesselator's thread carefully, it's all there.
MVC 570 is EFI64 only, that's why it requires 3,1 and higher.
You can use EFI64 card in 1,1 only when booting 64-bit kernel via Chameleon.
 
666sheep said:
MVC 570 is EFI64 only, that's why it requires 3,1 and higher.
You can use EFI64 card in 1,1 only when booting 64-bit kernel via Chameleon.
Click to expand...

And the advantages seem only to be the boot screen and some system list recognition. The later might actually cause some trouble with some applications although I can't think of any off hand.

Of course being in a MP3,1 will mean that it has x16 PCIe 2.0 instead of x16 PCIe 1.1, so some (very very few I would assume) apps will perform better because of that. The higher memory speed/bandwidth in the 3,1 would be much more of a factor in that regard I would assume.
 
Tesselator said:
And the advantages seem only to be the boot screen and some system list recognition. The later might actually cause some trouble with some applications although I can't think of any off hand.

Of course being in a MP3,1 will mean that it has x16 PCIe 2.0 instead of x16 PCIe 1.1, so some (very very few I would assume) apps will perform better because of that. The higher memory speed/bandwidth in the 3,1 would be much more of a factor in that regard I would assume.
Click to expand...

So Lion installed on a MacPro2,1 only boots into a 32-bit kernel and the 570 requires booting into a 64-bit OS kernel?

This is disappointing. The MacPro2,1 performs well, but is definitely lacking in the GPU department. Would be nice to extend the shelf life of this system, but there seem to be too many limitations with the MacPro1,1 and MacPro2,1 systems (Mountain Lion, GPUs, etc).
 
5050 said:
So Lion installed on a MacPro2,1 only boots into a 32-bit kernel and the 570 requires booting into a 64-bit OS kernel?

This is disappointing. The MacPro2,1 performs well, but is definitely lacking in the GPU department. Would be nice to extend the shelf life of this system, but there seem to be too many limitations with the MacPro1,1 and MacPro2,1 systems (Mountain Lion, GPUs, etc).
Click to expand...

So just don't get a flashed GTX 570? The unflashed models should work just fine with 10.7.5, per the FAQ thread.
 
Asgorath said:
So just don't get a flashed GTX 570? The unflashed models should work just fine with 10.7.5, per the FAQ thread.
Click to expand...

The unflashed 570 should run OpenGL and OpenCL with no conflicts?
 
Right. The conclusion my thread came to (Thanks to the search prowess of 666sheep) was that Premiere CS5 can't use the 570 cores at all. :( But CS5.5 and CS6 can. :)

The Luxmark benchmark used my 570 to good benefit but I dunno if I have any other software which uses CUDA specifically or not so I haven't tested further than those two.

It would be nice to have a list of OS X specific applications which can use and show the difference with a significant CUDA presence.
 
Tesselator said:
Right. The conclusion my thread came to (Thanks to the search prowess of 666sheep) was that Premiere CS5 can't use the 570 cores at all. :( But CS5.5 and CS6 can. :)

The Luxmark benchmark used my 570 to good benefit but I dunno if I have any other software which uses CUDA specifically or not so I haven't tested further than those two.

It would be nice to have a list of OS X specific applications which can use and show the difference with a significant CUDA presence.
Click to expand...

Sorry to hear that . . . more on that in a second.

But first, I've read the GTX 570 runs pretty hot. That being said, would there be any issues with the extra onboard VRAM on the EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD "2560MB" GDDR5? I could definitely use the extra VRAM on this particular 570 edition.

Going back to OS X apps benefiting from CUDA presence, here's my upgrade experience when I transitioned my GPU from a GT 120 to a GTX 690.

My last motion graphics job used a number of layers using Video Copilot's Element 3D plug-in. The GT 120 in my system at the time wasn't really optimized for this level of work and was killing my rendering times. This more or less prompted my recent efforts to really overhaul my system, beginning with the GPU.

Before updating the CPUs and RAM in my system, on the graphics card update alone I experienced a nearly 2,400% increase in render performance. What previously took around 80 hours to render "112 frames" of a 125 frame sequence on a GT 120 took around 46 minutes to complete "all 125 frames" with the GTX 690. My CPU and RAM upgrades weren't able to come even close to the increase in render performance realized by the GPU upgrade. Not to steer too far away from my original post, but if you plan to use Premiere and After Effects on your 1,1 system, upgrading to CS6 might provide serious performance gains and justify the price (as you'll be able to capitalize on the CUDA processing power of your installed 570). The thought process is nearly the same logic I used to update to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard in order to install a GPU like the GTX 690 (previously, I adamantly refused to upgrade OS X beyond Snow Leopard). Other notable performance gains include being able to playback 5K R3D files realtime in Premiere with the GTX 690. Insane.
 
Tesselator said:
And the advantages seem only to be the boot screen and some system list recognition. The later might actually cause some trouble with some applications although I can't think of any off hand.
Click to expand...

No, you won't have a EFI bootscreen with EFI 64 card in 1,1/2,1. It's like using unflashed card. Chameleon ignores EFI in the ROM and uses its BIOS part. It's like this:
Power on -> black screen -> Chameleon VESA screen -> OS X bootscreen (not EFI one) -> OS loaded.

Using EFI 32 card with Chameleon it's like this: Power on -> grey EFI bootscreen (with BootX available) -> black screen -> Chameleon VESA screen -> OS X bootscreen (not EFI one) -> OS loaded.
 
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