Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

GUI artifacts with GTX 970 and 12 core 5.1 Mac Pro

imayellowfellow

imayellowfellow

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 12, 2015
5
0
Hi all! So I just got a Classic Mac Pro with the following specs

Classic Mac Pro
Running Yosemite 10.10.4
4.1 flashed to 5.1
12 Core 3.33 Ghz (2 x5680)
32 GB 1333 Mhz ECC RAM (Crucial)
180 GB Intel 330 SSD
Highpoint Versatile Connectivity 2x USB 3.0 2x eSata 6gb

and I've installed an EVGA GTX 970 ACX 2.0 into the tower and powered it using the two 6 pin booster cables.

However, whenever I use it in an application like Premiere Pro, after a while I will get GUI artifacts (pink checkboards, black and white checkerboards) across my image. I'll exit premiere but it will still linger in certain parts of my screen.

I have Cuda 7.0.52 and Nvidia Web Driver 346.02.02f03 installed.

Do you know what is happening? Could something be up with the PSU? Or the Drivers? When I use the ATI 5770 and the mac drivers I don't see this issue at all.

_____________

Additional info ->
I have a hackintosh running 10.10.4 and the same drivers that I use with the Mac Pro as well. I used to have the hackintosh set up with 2x GTX 970 AC's (one of the cards that I am using in the Mac Pro) and I used to get this artifact issue as well (though not to as an intense degree), when I had each card running a display.

Then I had only one card acting as GUI and running both displays, and I did not notice the issue anymore. Now I have the hackintosh running one 970 and one 570 (acting as the GUI card) and I don't see the issue anymore either.

Could it be that I shouldn't run GUI through the 970 in the mac pro then? Would my issue be solved getting a card like the GT 120 and running the display through that?

Hackintosh stats

Gigabyte UP5 mobo
32 GB 1066 RAM
Intel i7 3770
240 gb PNY ssd
2x GTX 970
OR
1x GTX 970 and 1x GTX 570
Corsair 850 W PSU
 
You have almost the same setup as me.

Sounds like a classic broken video card to me, that pink chequer pattern is familiar. It could be the drivers I suppose, there were some reports of dodgy nVidia web drivers recently. I'm on f01 and have no problems in Lightroom, PS and FCX.
 
Inutopia said:
You have almost the same setup as me.

Sounds like a classic broken video card to me, that pink chequer pattern is familiar. It could be the drivers I suppose, there were some reports of dodgy nVidia web drivers recently. I'm on f01 and have no problems in Lightroom, PS and FCX.
Click to expand...

I was hoping that wasn't the problem... One thing though is I have two GTX 970's and have swapped both cards in the Mac Pro and have gotten the same artifacts. Could it be that both cards are faulty?

I use the cards in Windows 8.1 as well in the Hackintosh in SLI playing the Witcher 2 and don't get any of the same artifacting. Could it be something about how Mac uses the power management or controls the fan in the 970 that is causing it to overheat or something?

Thanks for the reply
 
Less likely but still possible. I do think you'd get the artefacts in Windows too though, so maybe not the cards. Unless the 970 is badly put together, I'd probably rule out heat. They're very cool running cards in my experience. The fan levels are set by the cards BIOS too, so should be the same across Windows and OS X.

Possible try an older driver? Update premier etc.
 
There were some other reports of that with the new 346.02.02f03 driver, it might just be a bug in that release. Hopefully NVIDIA will come out with a fix for it soon if that's the case.

Can you post screenshots that show the corruption?
 
Synchro3 said:
Are you using more than 3.5 GB video RAM?

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-memory-issue-fully-explained/

I wonder if a GTX 980 would have the same issue?
Click to expand...

Maybe it is a VRAM issue... On a single GTX 970 I would try to run a 1080p monitor and a 4K display simultaneously while also running Premiere. In the instance where I had another card run the GUI, that card was only driving one 1080p monitor and it ran without any artifacting.

I have taken the card out of my machines and don't have the time to put them back at the moment because I'm editing a job on the machine but it usually looked something like this (I know this is from a linux machine but it looked similar).

http://i.imgur.com/9pkNR.jpg
 
That's similar to what my failed video cards were displaying. But it's still very strange that both of your cards would suffer from failures at the same time and not have any issues in Windows...
 
just switched my setup to 1 1080p monitor and the GTX 970 in my mac pro. No more GUI artifacting under heavy load through benchmarking or heavy use through premiere. Might have been a VRAM thing I guess from running too many resolution displays through the one card I guess...
 
I have a similar setup but with a 980ti card. Previous machine was an iMac and it had a 780 with 4Gb VRAM...and I had artifacts on that too. Those artifacts show up when you are running out of VRAM. Happens quite fast for me when using Blender. I think it is something with Yosemite and how it uses video memory as this problem didn't happen in 10.9.

On my Pro what I have found is that switching to a lower resolution in loDPI mode frees up a ton of VRAM. You can check and watch this with iStat Menus installed.
 
I have no problem pushing mine hard at 1440p. I've also more than maxed out the VRAM in windows and no corruption.

I'm still thinking this is a driver/OS bug, as corruption shouldn't be the result of going over the 4GB VRAM limit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back