recent nVidia cards on MacPro 1,1?

[fiatlux]

It was my understanding that recent nVidia cards did not work on MacPro 1,1 machines because they only had EFI64 firmware, while ATI cards had EFI32/64 firmware.

But now that you can use regular PC ATI cards w/o flashing them (and lacking any EFI support I would assume), can you also use recent nVidia cards in MacPro 1,1 (mac or PC cards)? Or is it a problem of drivers?

 

[Cindori]

It was my understanding that recent nVidia cards did not work on MacPro 1,1 machines because they only had EFI64 firmware, while ATI cards had EFI32/64 firmware.

But now that you can use regular PC ATI cards w/o flashing them (and lacking any EFI support I would assume), can you also use recent nVidia cards in MacPro 1,1 (mac or PC cards)? Or is it a problem of drivers?

well nothing has changed on the mac pro, the only thing that can change is driver or card. since ati card != nvidia card, and ati drivers != nvidia drivers, the answer is no.

either ati drivers can detect card by themselves, or there is EFI stuff inside new ATI cards firmware (many PC motherboards are coming out with EFI now), i really dont know.

 

[CaptainChunk]

But now that you can use regular PC ATI cards w/o flashing them (and lacking any EFI support I would assume), can you also use recent nVidia cards in MacPro 1,1 (mac or PC cards)? Or is it a problem of drivers?

It seems that would only be feasible provided that NVIDIA provided EFI32 (needed for 1,1 and 2,1 Mac Pros) support as part of the card's ROM image. And historically, at least with past Mac-specific NVIDIA cards, I wouldn't count on it. The last NVIDIA card to ship with EFI32 compatible firmware (I think) was the 8800 GT and it was a separate product from the EFI64 version, manufactured due to overwhelming demand at the time.

 

[666sheep]

can you also use recent nVidia cards in MacPro 1,1

PC cards and only with Netkas injector + EFI32 helper card combo. AFAIK not all cards will work this way, but some will do, especially for CUDA use.