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nvidia web drivers for 10.10.5

Irishman said:
Can you help me understand why you're so confident?

I don't understand the question?

Oh, and why are the CUDA drivers offered separately??

Because Nvidia is supporting the Mac Platform with Drivers that will allow Nvidia Cards to work in a Mac Pro that will not work with the Apple supplied Drivers. If you had a cMP, you would see many threads on this very subject. There is a forum member here, that specializes in putting a Mac EFI on Nvidia PC cards to allow them to show a boot screen on a Mac. Many late model Nvidia PC cards will work on a Mac Pro (with Nvidia Drivers) but not show a boot screen.

Concerning CUDA. CUDA is a unique parallel computing platform that Apple does not support, but some Mac software does. Installing CUDA enables the GPU to take advantage of the CUDA capabilities of such programs.

Lastly, to answer why I'm looking into doing it at all, is that I read on a forum that someone had their gameplay performance improve significantly in Metro Redux by doing so.

I have no experience on that subject.

As both games are literally unplayable for me now, I'm desperate. :)
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See answers to your questions above in RED!

Lou
 
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Irishman said:
Can you help me understand why you're so confident?

Oh, and why are the CUDA drivers offered separately??

Lastly, to answer why I'm looking into doing it at all, is that I read on a forum that someone had their gameplay performance improve significantly in Metro Redux by doing so.

As both games are literally unplayable for me now, I'm desperate. :)
Click to expand...

Your machine is quite old and the driver improvements are mostly for Kepler GPU architecture. You will get less out of the web driver than your futile search for a religious relic that is largely a myth. Ahem, sorry.
 
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Doesn't the 2012 iMac has a Kepler GPU?
Just install it, in worst case you can easily disable the Web Driver with a PRAM reset.
 
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You don't Need CUDA for gaming, but yes, installation is easy, too.

Doesn't Nvidia advertise their whole Web driver as "Beta"? :D
 
Irishman said:
All the Kepler GPUs that Apple has put in their desktops are "cut down mobile version".
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The Kepler optimisation was specifically for the Quadro Workstation card but also showed improvements in other Kepler desktop cards. Remember, the web driver is first and foremost a driver for the Quadro family. Everything else is consequential because of UDA.
 
Done. Running some benchmarks now. Will you know what I learn.

Also re-downloading Metro Redux from Steam to try again.
 
Holy ****!! Metro 2033 Redux is now playable on my iMac. The web driver did the trick, guys! I'm gonna download Metro Last Light Redux tonight and possibly Dead Island (a game that's NEVER ran well) and see if it helps frame rates.

Just a rough guesstimate of the improvement in Metro 2033 - it went from 2-5 seconds per frame to about 20-25 fps now.
 
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Irishman said:
Holy ****!! Metro 2033 Redux is now playable on my iMac. The web driver did the trick, guys! I'm gonna download Metro Last Light Redux tonight and possibly Dead Island (a game that's NEVER ran well) and see if it helps frame rates.

Just a rough guesstimate of the improvement in Metro 2033 - it went from 2-5 seconds per frame to about 20-25 fps now.
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It shouldn't have been on 2-5fps in the first place. The 650M can run Advanced Warfare (Bootcamp obviously) well without the web driver and that's a newer game than Metro.
 
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SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
It shouldn't have been on 2-5fps in the first place. The 650M can run Advanced Warfare well without the web driver and that's a newer game than Metro.
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It's a known bug, Metro Redux doesn't run on any Nvidia card with stock Apple drivers. Even a crappy Intel HD iGPU will outperform a GTX 680 easily in this game.

It's the same I had reported in the Metro thread over at the gaming section: Unplayable on my freshly flashed GTX 760 with stock drivers, perfectly smooth with Web Drivers.
 
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SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
It shouldn't have been on 2-5fps in the first place. The 650M can run Advanced Warfare (Bootcamp obviously) well without the web driver and that's a newer game than Metro.
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No, it was worse than that. It wasn't 2-5 frames per second. It was 2-5 seconds per frame.

Now? I'm playing it and enjoying it. :)
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
The Kepler optimisation was specifically for the Quadro Workstation card but also showed improvements in other Kepler desktop cards. Remember, the web driver is first and foremost a driver for the Quadro family. Everything else is consequential because of UDA.
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You sure seem confident that you fully understand how the NVIDIA driver for OS X is implemented. Anyway. Don't forget the GTX 680 is a non-Quadro official product from NVIDIA that is fully supported by their web driver.

My reading of the "beta" status of the latest web driver releases was purely the fact they're letting it be installed on iMacs and laptops as well, since those used to be excluded. The GK104 in the iMacs is the exact same GPU as the one in the GTX 680 add-in card, for example. There's nothing "beta" about the GPU support itself, I think it's more that now they're letting a new set of drivers to be installed on your laptop/iMac which was never officially possible before.
 
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Fl0r!an said:
It's a known bug, Metro Redux doesn't run on any Nvidia card with stock Apple drivers. Even a crappy Intel HD iGPU will outperform a GTX 680 easily in this game.

It's the same I had reported in the Metro thread over at the gaming section: Unplayable on my freshly flashed GTX 760 with stock drivers, perfectly smooth with Web Drivers.
Click to expand...

I like how installing the web drivers gives you a menu bar access to the option of switching back to Apple's native OS X drivers.

Ooooh, almost forgot. Metro Last Light plays as well as 2033, and it offers advanced PhysX particle effects.

Nice!
 
Asgorath said:
You sure seem confident that you fully understand how the NVIDIA driver for OS X is implemented.
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All I know is how UDA is implemented in any Windows, Mac or Linux driver and what it means for compatibility. I was the only person after months of discussion here who brought up UDA and the only person who knew that Maxwell's data compression support hasn't been implemented yet. Nvidia confirmed it when they said Maxwell support only started its beta phase in the most recent update. That's all.
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
All I know is how UDA is implemented in any Windows, Mac or Linux driver and what it means for compatibility. I was the only person after months of discussion here who brought up UDA and the only person who knew that Maxwell's data compression support hasn't been implemented yet. Nvidia confirmed it when they said Maxwell support only started its beta phase in the most recent update. That's all.
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Again, I think you're reading a lot into what they said. This is the first time NVIDIA has talked about Maxwell in the web driver in any kind of official capacity. It's been unofficially (i.e. silently) enabled for a very long time.
 
Asgorath said:
Again, I think you're reading a lot into what they said. This is the first time NVIDIA has talked about Maxwell in the web driver in any kind of official capacity. It's been unofficially (i.e. silently) enabled for a very long time.
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It was just running on UDA it seems unless there is some evidence to the contrary. I'm not a guy who just believes in things on 'faith' alone.
 
Fl0r!an said:
Just a small indication: If the generic UDA driver is enough to drive any Nvidia card, why isn't Apples stock driver able to drive anything beyond a GTX 780?
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Likely isn't UDA compliant so that Apple could control how their OS was used by Hackintoshers and control Mac Pro upgrades.
 
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