If Machines is the Emperor, I'm the Court Jester.

[lewnworxx]

Recently, after a many year hiatus I've gotten back into 3D work.

Back in the day I was an ElectricImage user, and after resubmerging myself in this stuff (Rhino Mac Beta / Blender) I was getting up to speed quite nicely.

Well outside of the abysmal render speeds.

Gotta MP 5.1 Xeon dual 2.4. While Rhino Mac seemed to be acceptable (outside of taking pretty long time to calc some operations) Blender was just dog slow on the GTX285.

Thus began the upgrade path. I got a flashed 4GB 680 off eBay. That helped, but was still pretty dog slow. 10 second anim took almost 3 days to render on the 680.

Furthermore it's flaky. It's locked up the box completely mid frame render on several occasions.

So I started looking for better cards, scouring the sites, picking up info from other forums, looking at the work MacVideoCards has been doing and the guy from the other site Ketavas? Can't remember off the top of my head.

Anyway I run into Machine's post about the 970 non flashed pair he's been running and his blender benchmark floored me. The box on CPU takes 2.15 to render that, the 680 does it in 1.05.

So hell yeah, off to Fryes I go and come home with a brandy new 970 to start with until I get the cabling and power issues for 2 cards sorted.

Based of what I knew already from here and the other forums I knew I'd have to jump from 10.9.x to 10.10. Ok so where I'm at I have zero net. Ok, a wifi hotspot I use for work email and whatnot, certainly nothing to do a full 10.10 install on, so I DL the yosemite installer at work, toss it on a USB flash drive, and bring it here to install.

That part I detailed in another thread.

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20864479#post20864479

So now my dilemma is how to get back to getting this box to run. I guess I can try reinstalling yosemite, (damn installer self deletes after running). Time machine's of no use as it didn't get a chance to do a backup before I tried installing the NVIdia drivers, so I don't even have the stock nvidia ones from the 10.10 install.

Not sure what to do.

This is ridiculous. Avoiding this kinna crap is the entire reason I've been a mac guy for closing on 3 decades.

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

I'm confused. I was following your story up until you had to install Yosemite, and then you go into the fact that something is messed up, but you don't give any mention as to what the actual issue is. It is mandatory we read that linked thread or can you summarize what the actual problem is?

 

[lewnworxx]

The details of what broke are in the other thread. I didn't want to be accused of spamming.

The other thread was about the security patch from today, and others hoping it wouldn't break the Nvidia drivers. It does. And in my case, a whole lot more.

Update:

Had to reinstall Yosemite from scratch.

After probing around, the security patch DID change the nvidia stuff (at least the creation and mod dates are totally different than the 10.10 install in looking at the KEXTS). So yeah, do NOT apply the security patch if you're running Nvidia unless you want to watch your screen refresh a line at a time.

After a complete reinstall at least I'm back at square one. Still no Nvidia pref pane, still no support for the 10.10.x Nvidia Web drivers, so I'm stuck in limbo, but at least the box runs.

FWIW the 10.10.2 install (if you were as hapless as I was and installed it today) shows up as 14C1514. If only I'd downloaded the installer yesterday everything would be fine would be my guess. IF Nvidia does release drivers that WILL install, I'll be searching for some way to shut off Apple's annoying nag screens prompting me at every opportunity to install whatever flaky assed patch they put out to fix the bugs they brought on from the last flaky assed patch.

 

[sarthak]

Compatibility is largely the reason I'm still on an official 5870. Unless you have a PC card that is professionally modified allowing for EFI and full PCI-E support, it won't function as well as an official Mac version. I don't doubt you bought a nice professionally done 680 4GB off eBay and there is no other hardware-wise reason for it not to perform.

Not sure how much one can blame the software either. Rhino Mac beta does work quite well (even on my older Mac Pro 8 Core with a 5870 and only 18GB of RAM atm...) as it does in your case. However, performance does appear to vary quite a bit card to card in many other pro apps.

The current state of the Mac Pros with PC cards does require a tinkering and experimentation (or unless you use the same config such as multiple cards, external PSU as others). Unfortunately, Apple has never really officially offered anything beyond a 5870 in the cMP and even the EVGA 680 for Mac or 7950 Mac Edition aren't the best performing (or performance for dollar for that matter). With the nMP, it is really up to the community and manufacturers to provide support.

As for OS X, new updates will break such custom configurations every once in a while and I guess the first person to experience a disaster saves the rest of the community quite a bit of time by alerting them not to upgrade.

Let us know how the 970 works out in terms of performance.