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MP 1,1-5,1 STABLE DIFFUSION- MacPro 5,1 and External nVidia GPU

bildad

bildad

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 30, 2007
6
0
I have a number of MacPro 5,1 and I'd like to explore running Stable Diffusion. I know very little about Stable Diffusion but have been using MidJourney for the last nine months so AI art generation is not a new concept but Stable Diffusion is. I'm wondering if it would be possible to set up an nVidia gpu in an external case, connect through a Thunderbolt card in the MP and just use the nVidia card to render the art. I would maintain the current gtx980 to drive the monitor. The Mac running OpenCore/Montery. Any reason the gpu that drives the display has to be the one rendering the Stable Diffusion prompts? and Is there a way to configure SD to use an external gpu? similar to renting gpu time.
 
So, you want to use a completely unsupported GPU via TB3 eGPU with macOS?!?! GTX 980 is a Maxwell GPU and support ends with 10.13.6.

You sure need to re-think your plans, forget any NVIDIA GPUs with Monterey, Apple removed any support for the only NVIDIA still supported, the Kepler NVIDIA generation, with Monterey.

So, no METAL support with NVIDIA Kepler GPUs with Monterey.
 
bro. why do this? why contort yourself to run a computer thats 10+ years old just because its a mac pro
 
I was not planning to run the Mac's display with the external nVidia card. And I mispoke, internal is
a 680 4GB and I'm running Windows 10 which I upgraded from and old Windows 7 disk. The external gpu's sole purpose would be to render the AI prompt from Stable Diffusion and wouldn't perform the standard graphic display duties. Stable Diffusion users currently can rent gpu time in the 'cloud' so it doesn't seem too far a stretch to think an external nVidia gpu could do.
 
Last edited:
bildad said:
I was not planning to run the Mac's display with the nVidia card. And I mispoke it's a 680 4GB and I'm running Windows 10 which I upgraded from and old Windows 7 disk. The external gpu's sole purpose would be to render the AI prompt from Stable Diffusion and wouldn't perform the standard graphic display duties. Stable Diffusion users currently can rent gpu time in the 'cloud' so it doesn't seem too far a stretch to think an external nVidia gpu could do.
Click to expand...

You are failing to grasp that you need Monterey drivers for the GPU, since you need METAL for the GPU to work as a compute device. No drivers and the GPU doesn't exist from the Monterey point of view. So, it's AMD or bust.

If you gonna run Windows on your Mac Pro, then the constrains are different.
 
impulse462 said:
bro. why do this? why contort yourself to run a computer thats 10+ years old just because its a mac pro
Click to expand...
It's not just because it's a Mac Pro, it's because a I've five of them and I'm stupid. Right now I'm just asking questions. It quite likely cheaper to buy a PC and certainly easier.
 
tsialex said:
You are failing to grasp that you need Monterey drivers for the GPU, since you need METAL for the GPU to work as a compute device. No drivers and the GPU doesn't exist from the Monterey point of view. So, it's AMD or bust.

If you gonna run Windows on your Mac Pro, then the constrains are different.
Click to expand...
I think in my reply I stated I'm running Windows 10 Pro.
 
If you have 5 cMP, then don't make it complicated. Just install a GTX980 into one of them, and run Windows 10. Then that particular cMP will able to run Stable Diffusion (assuming Automatic1111 webui), and it can become the SD server in your local network. You may remote access that stable diffusion local server from other cMP by just using the browser, Monterey or not doesn't really matter. Any browser (even on an iPhone) can do the job.

Anyway, GTX980 will be very very slow for stable diffusion. And 4GB VRAM is extremely limiting. With the low VRAM paramter and Xformer, you may able to produce some 768x768 images, but I doubt if you can go larger than that.
 
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