MP 1,1-5,1 MacVidCards went dark in person too

[Asgorath]

Correct, anyone can have ripped a ROM and shared it. Doing extra validation work would be expensive and probably someone would crack it. There was about 4 people selling flashed cards. Three of them got into fights. It was a bad look for us and am glad now Apple has moved the boot screen to the motherboard. Any GPU should work in the Mac Pro 7,1 is macOS drivers are present. Let's see.

Couple of things:

1) The 680 ROM and all subsequent custom ROMs (for Maxwell and Pascal) need a larger ROM chip than the one that comes on the PC versions of all NVIDIA cards, at least up until Turing. Flashing a PC card with a Mac-compatible ROM means installing a new larger ROM chip, which always seemed like the biggest benefit of having someone like MVC do it for you as this is likely beyond the abilities of most users.

2) While the 680 ROM was the starting point for all the custom Kepler ROMs, netkas and MVC had to reverse engineer the Maxwell and Pascal ROMs and write their own UEFI ROM for those cards. I kind of understand why they'd be upset if people then ripped their ROM off their boards and then started giving it away for free, or reselling it as their own work (both of which have happened in the past, as I understand it).

To be crystal clear, please do not read this as a defense of MVC, I'm simply attempting to point out that the Mac ROM situation is a lot more complex than just "rip the 680 Mac Edition ROM and all future NVIDIA cards will just work".

 

[LightBulbFun]

1) The 680 ROM and all subsequent custom ROMs (for Maxwell and Pascal) need a larger ROM chip than the one that comes on the PC versions of all NVIDIA cards, at least up until Turing. Flashing a PC card with a Mac-compatible ROM means installing a new larger ROM chip, which always seemed like the biggest benefit of having someone like MVC do it for you as this is likely beyond the abilities of most users.

just to add to the above

from what I have seen from the leak MVC ROM dumps

the ROMs are still within PC ROM Card size, just MVC padded them out to 512KB so you would have to solder on a new larger EEPROM if you where doing things blindly

but its easy enough to trim out the padding from the ROM file and then flash it onto a stock PC card, although I have personally not tried due to a lack of hardware (but looking at the leaks I think others have done so)

it makes sense because the PC Cards already support GOP EFI plus a legacy VBIOS, MVC is "just" replacing the GOP EFI part with a custom made UGA EFI section, meaning the resulting ROM size ends up being about the same size as the stock ROM

 

[Asgorath]

just to add to the above

from what I have seen from the leak MVC ROM dumps

the ROMs are still within PC ROM Card size, just MVC padded them out to 512KB so you would have to solder on a new larger EEPROM if you where doing things blindly

but its easy enough to trim out the padding from the ROM file and then flash it onto a stock PC card, although I have personally not tried due to a lack of hardware (but looking at the leaks I think others have done so)

it makes sense because the PC Cards already support GOP EFI plus a legacy VBIOS, MVC is "just" replacing the GOP EFI part with a custom made UGA EFI section, meaning the resulting ROM size ends up being about the same size as the stock ROM

NVIDIA PC cards absolutely do not support GOP EFI by default, at least for every architecture prior to Turing (though NVIDIA did add support for it with their Turing cards as I understand it). If they did, any PC card would show a boot screen when plugged into a Mac Pro, and we know this isn't the case. They obviously do support the standard UEFI that modern PC motherboards use, but that's different to the Mac Pro.

I'm not aware of the details of MVC unnecessarily padding out the size of his ROM file so that it required a new EEPROM chip, my understanding was that the GTX 680 Mac Edition did come with a larger EEPROM chip than the regular PC versions of the GTX 680. In any case, the GTX 680 GOP EFI doesn't just magically work on Maxwell and Pascal GPUs, and so MVC and netkas still had to reverse engineer it and write their own. If part of that was increasing the size to prevent people from just posting their ROM images online so anyone could flash their cards, I can understand why they did that.

 

[startergo]

NVIDIA PC cards absolutely do not support GOP EFI by default, at least for every architecture prior to Turing (though NVIDIA did add support for it with their Turing cards as I understand it). If they did, any PC card would show a boot screen when plugged into a Mac Pro

MacPro uses UGA not GOP EFI, so no cards with GOP EFI would natively show a boot screen without support for UGA protocol or a third party bootloader like refind. It is known cMP 3.1 somehow shows the bootscren through a modified refind driver, but not the cMP5,1.

 

[tsialex]

NVIDIA PC cards absolutely do not support GOP EFI by default, at least for every architecture prior to Turing (though NVIDIA did add support for it with their Turing cards as I understand it). If they did, any PC card would show a boot screen when plugged into a Mac Pro, and we know this isn't the case. They obviously do support the standard UEFI that modern PC motherboards use, but that's different to the Mac Pro.

I'm not aware of the details of MVC unnecessarily padding out the size of his ROM file so that it required a new EEPROM chip, my understanding was that the GTX 680 Mac Edition did come with a larger EEPROM chip than the regular PC versions of the GTX 680. In any case, the GTX 680 GOP EFI doesn't just magically work on Maxwell and Pascal GPUs, and so MVC and netkas still had to reverse engineer it and write their own. If part of that was increasing the size to prevent people from just posting their ROM images online so anyone could flash their cards, I can understand why they did that.

A lot of wrong assumptions here.

1. NVIDIA supports GOP pre-boot configuration support since second generation Kepler days, most GT(X) 7xx have GOP UEFI support from factory or have an option of upgrade firmware from NVIDIA. For some time NVIDIA offered updated firmwares even for GTX 680 to anyone who asked via support.
2. Mac Pro up to 5,1 are EFI and pre-boot configuration support used is UGA. After around 2012/2013, Apple changed all Macs to UEFI and now the pre-boot configuration support protocol used is GOP. MP6,1 uses GOP.
3. Turing cards are GOP and have a translation shim to UGA, so it works with an UGA Mac Pro enough to show the screen. It's a generic UGA support, not a Mac UGA support.

 

[netkas]

Hint, you are still wrong in pt. 2

A lot of wrong assumptions here.

1. NVIDIA supports GOP pre-boot configuration support since second generation Kepler days, most GT(X) 7xx have GOP UEFI support from factory or have an option of upgrade firmware from NVIDIA. For some time NVIDIA offered updated firmwares even for GTX 680 to anyone who asked via support.
2. Mac Pro up to 5,1 are EFI and pre-boot configuration support used is UGA. After around 2012/2013, Apple changed all Macs to UEFI and now the pre-boot configuration support protocol used is GOP. MP6,1 uses GOP.
3. Turing cards are GOP and have a translation shim to UGA, so it works with an UGA Mac Pro enough to show the screen. It's a generic UGA support, not a Mac UGA support.

 

[tsialex]

Hint, you are still wrong in pt. 2

Care to explain? I imagine that you are talking about MP6,1…

 

[Asgorath]

MacPro uses UGA not GOP EFI, so no cards with GOP EFI would natively show a boot screen without support for UGA protocol or a third party bootloader like refind. It is known cMP 3.1 somehow shows the bootscren through a modified refind driver, but not the cMP5,1.

Sorry, it's been a very long time since I thought about this, I had confused UGA vs GOP. My basic point still stands: no NVIDIA PC card natively supported the classic Mac Pro until Turing. The Mac Edition cards had a different ROM image that specifically supported the Mac Pro. My understanding was that these Mac Edition cards needed a larger EEPROM chip to support the Mac Pro, and that's why part of MVC's modifications included installing a larger EEPROM chip in order to flash their custom ROM image.