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I don't see anything special in that screen..?


btw, about my last post, here is an explanation from rominator:

"The 6870 cards aren't working due to any EFI in BIOS.

They are working due to changes in APple's ATI drivers, which are now functioning as if they have an "ATY_Init" built in.

They are setting their own keys, with or without EFI."

I thought the fact that it was displaying EFI info was significant, but I guess I am wrong?
 
XFX Radeon HD 6870

I have a Mac Pro with OS X Lion on it working with the XFX Radeon HD 6870. Needed a different Kernel though

Star Craft 2 runs at highest spec possible

Had no problems so far with CS4 Suite
 
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I got it done at a PC Repair shop. So I'm not sure which Kernel he used.

How do you find out the Kernel
 
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whoco5.gif
 
I think Cindori is suggesting you gain a better understanding of what kernels and kernel extensions are, because what you're saying doesn't jive with the understanding of the vastly more experienced denizens of this forum.
 
Just thought I'd add to this. Sapphire 6870 is working in my Mac Pro 1,1. About to test out Starcraft 2 running under OSX. Before with my 7300 it was almost unplayable even on low settings. Under Windows it was fine under low-to medium settings. Hopefully I can crank this thing up now.
 
Ok I had no idea this was possible till I accidentally rebooted into osx with the card still plugged in. I am very, very excited. Do we know how effective the drivers available for this card are compared the windows ones?

Also i installed the drivers listed on a the previous page. Am i supposed to lose an input?

Before:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

After:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

So what are the capabilities of this card with these drivers?
I've been getting ~30fps in TF2 at full settings, this seems like crap to me.
 
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Ok I had no idea this was possible till I accidentally rebooted into osx with the card still plugged in. I am very, very excited. Do we know how effective the drivers available for this card are compared the windows ones?

Also i installed the drivers listed on a the previous page. Am i supposed to lose an input?

Before: [url=http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/6044/screenshot20111010at931.png]Image[/URL]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

After:

[url=http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/3610/screenshot20111010at952.png]Image[/URL]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

So what are the capabilities of this card with these drivers?
I've been getting ~30fps in TF2 at full settings, this seems like crap to me.

I think you are somewhat confused.

Anyone monkey on the planet could put a 6870 in a Mac Pro and have it work in OSX. This has been true since April when the 10.6.6 image for iMac came out.

It looks like you actually flashed the card's ROM, which is a very different thing than installing drivers.

If you connect a DVI on lower port you should now see a boot screen.

Apple & ATI decided to make the drivers work.

Netkas modded the iMac ROM and figured out how to make it work with existing ROMs.

It looks like you have flashed the card with Netkas' ROM...don't know why else you would see a this screen.
 
Whoops it looks like I got a little too excited and carried away. I used the goths link for the drivers. There were two installers. The first was definitely the kept installer. I guess the ati graphics update was the flasher? I can't find any specific evidence but a few archives I can open, so I assume they are the binary images.

Anyways I still can't boot the card by itself so I guess it didn't work anyways.
 
stop smoking crack

please

you have clearly just been clicking on buttons and typing up words with no understanding of what you are doing or saying

nobody can help someone who posts utter nonsense
 
My post makes perfect sense if you wouldn't have your head so far up your ass.

If the flashing process has become incredibly easier in the past few years and now carries far fewer warnings then it did before and efi32 is now supported then i may have have flashed my card. If not i did NOT flash my card. The EFI bit is a bit peculiar though.

I did however install the kexts that were provided earlier in this thread.
 
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6870 performance in Mac Pro 1,1

Hi

I recently installed the XFX 6870 in my Mac Pro 1,1. Got everything running with the updated drivers and KEXT from Groths.org (thanx btw).

Though the thing is that I had expected some kind of performance boost but neither xbench or cinebench show any noticeable increase. I replace the BTO 1900XT that I had earlier.

I'm currently running 10.6.8, could I expect better performance in Lion or could it be so that the the 16 lane PCIe that I have is a bottleneck? Feels a bit wasted to spend +$200 and get just a less noisy card ;-) So, what performance increase have you seen when exchanging the 1900XT? Could I have done something wrong?
 
Bumping this thread since I'm also curious if anyone knows what might be the difference. I got the same XBENCH scores using an 6870 in a 2008 Mac Pro, but the cinebench score is about 50% higher.
 
Already posted this in another thread here, but ....

Since this seems to be an active place discussing my exact issue, here goes ....

Last night, I took the plunge and bought an XFX branded Radeon 6870 card (1GB) for my 2008 Mac Pro tower running Lion 10.7.2.

I plugged it in, and as expected from what people have been saying for months, it basically worked fine, out of the box. (Tested DVD Player though and it crashed on me.)

Then I downloaded the 6870 package available here: http://www.groths.org/?p=431

I ran the setup program in that archive, but DVD Player still crashed on me after that completed. Is that because this package was only intended for Snow Leopard users, or does something need further updating to deal with Lion 10.7.2??

My next step was to get EFI flashed into the 6870 card's BIOS, so I could get back the gray boot screens. Had problems here too. I was able to run GPU-Z from my Windows partition and dump the original BIOS to a file without any issues, but then when I tried to reboot to OS X and modify that file using Zeus 2.8, Zeus kept crashing with AppleScript errors trying to apply the EFI extensions?

What now?

Thanks for any assistance here! The work people have been doing on this project so far is great!
 
please could someone post a link to the kexts required to get this working in Lion again? I clicked on the groths link posted earlier and got a 404 error, I guess they were taken down again?

Thanks
 
please could someone post a link to the kexts required to get this working in Lion again? I clicked on the groths link posted earlier and got a 404 error, I guess they were taken down again?

Thanks

ok, once again.

the card works in Lion with no help from anyone

This applies equally to ANY Mac Pro

In 10.6.6 or 10.6.7 there were special kexts from iMac and Macbook updates that enabled 6870, once 10.6.8 came out, not needed anymore. Cindori bundled those kexts with an installer, but unless you are running 10.6.6 or 10.6.7, there is no need

also not needed in Lion. In fact, installing 10.6.7 kexts from a Macbook onto a 10.7.2 install is likely to bugger everything up

If you have a 3,1 or later Mac Pro, then flashing the card is a good idea. But this is not the right place to get info on that. Netkas wrote the EFI and an app to extract the 6870 BIOS and then glue together a finished EFI ROM, so go to his site and read up there. And if it works, send him a small donation as way of thanks.
 
re: ok, once again

Thanks for the info, MacVidCards. That's helpful to know ....

I still have a few questions though.

1. Why was DVD Player still crashing on me when I tried to use the 6870 card with Lion 10.7.2 without any modifications? Is that something that worked with 10.7.1 and then broke with the .2 update and is not yet fixed/fixable?

2. I tried to go to netkas's site last night and download his EFI firmware to paste in, but found the file attachments on the forum didn't seem to be accessible unless I was a registered user there. Well, I tried to register and the site would never send me the activation email (even checked my spam folders)!


ok, once again.

the card works in Lion with no help from anyone

This applies equally to ANY Mac Pro

In 10.6.6 or 10.6.7 there were special kexts from iMac and Macbook updates that enabled 6870, once 10.6.8 came out, not needed anymore. Cindori bundled those kexts with an installer, but unless you are running 10.6.6 or 10.6.7, there is no need

also not needed in Lion. In fact, installing 10.6.7 kexts from a Macbook onto a 10.7.2 install is likely to bugger everything up

If you have a 3,1 or later Mac Pro, then flashing the card is a good idea. But this is not the right place to get info on that. Netkas wrote the EFI and an app to extract the 6870 BIOS and then glue together a finished EFI ROM, so go to his site and read up there. And if it works, send him a small donation as way of thanks.
 
HELP ! XFX 6870 not working properly in MP 1.1

I tried getting these drivers from the previous page that others mentioned, but the link is dead.

My card is also showing up as an ATI Radeon HD N140. Here is a pic of my system profiler.
 

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