Update from 2017: This post is five years old now, but lots of people still find it through Google. So I thought I'd update it just to say that I sold the Mac Pro with an Nvidia card to my dad, and it has been working fine through the various OS upgrades. Googling around suggests that the 10×0 cards work fine in Mac Pros too. I replaced my Pro with a MacBook Air and a custom gaming PC, but I think the 4,1/5,1 Pro remains a really good computer.
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- ASUS ROG GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX-GTX1070-O8G-GAMING 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready Video Card with RGB Lighting. Core Clock: 1657 MHz - OC Mode 1632 MHz - Gaming Mode (Default).Retail goods are with default Gaming Mode, OC Mode can be adjusted with one click on GPU Tweak II Max Resolution: 7680 x 4320 DisplayPort: 2 x DisplayPort 1.4 DVI: 1 x DVI-D.
- GeForce GTX 260 (5) GeForce GTX 285 (4) GeForce GTX 285 for Mac (2) GeForce GTX 295 (6) GeForce G/GT series. GeForce GT 730 (4) GeForce 9 series. GeForce 9800 GTX (2) GeForce 9800 GTX+ (3) Show More. 24GB (1) 12GB (31) 11GB (123) 8GB (285) 6GB.
- The features of the GTX 260 Core 216 896-P3-1255-AR include the 55nm GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 (576MHz clock) chipset, 896MB of 448-bit 1ns GDDR3 memory with a 999MHz clock with an effective rate of 1998MHz, 1242MHz Shader Clock, 216 processing cores, PCI Express 2.0 compatibility, Dual DVI-I connectors, 111.9GB per second memory bandwidth, 2nd.
- NVIDIA ® GeForce ® RTX graphics cards and laptops are powered by NVIDIA Turing ™, the architecture for gamers and creators.Get truly next-gen performance and features with dedicated ray tracing cores and AI-powered DLSS 2.0.
I thought I'd try dropping a GeForce GTX 670 into my Mac Pro, since apparently 10.8 can drive it (you just won't get the EFI boot screens). I bought the 2GB EVGA 670 FTW, mostly since that has two six-pin power plugs. The top OEM card for the Mac Pro is the Radeon 5870, which is a good card but also pretty old, so — on paper — the 670 is a nice upgrade. The 670 is actually a little cheaper, too. The drivers in Mac OS are still pretty immature, so my goal was to get equal-or-slightly-better performance for now, and way better performance in Windows.
Installing it is pretty straight-forward, if you've ever done computer stuff at all. Here's my Mac Pro as it sat, with the 5870.
This card takes the award winning, 896MB-loaded, EVGA GTX 260 and increases the total Processing Cores to an incredible 216, compared to 192. This bump in performance keeps the card running perfectly smooth even with the most stressful applications, and with PhysX ™ and CUDA ™ support, you are properly equipped for the future.
The 670 is a little smaller.
The 670 dropped right into the 5870's spot, and hooked up to its power plugs. These are standard parts, of course, so if it didn't that would mean I'm really dumb. You can see that I also put in a little PCI fan (powered from the spare optical drive SATA port, and a SATA-to-Molex adapter). This pushed a lot of air, but it was really noisy, and it didn't seem to make much difference; the only thing making much heat in the PCI bay is the GPU (the rear hard drives being idle most of the time), and both the 5870 and 670 keep their heat fairly contained in those plastic shrouds, and push it out the back. Maybe the fan did a little something, but it wasn't worth the noise. So, the little PCI fan is gone now.
So I did that, and it booted. That was nice. You don't get the grey boot screen (the video drivers loads when the OS does, so it appears to boot straight to the desktop). With the fast SSD booting, it was just, like, 'push button, wait 20 seconds, be at desktop'. The obvious problem is that if you find yourself looking at the startup manager a lot, this is a bad solution — you no longer get that. In that case, it's worth keeping things OEM or finding a flashed Nvidia card that gives you the boot screen.
Anyhow, it worked just fine. I went to run benchmarks, and LuxMark couldn't load. No OpenCL. So I found a fix from Netkas, installed it, and hey, liftoff. So, here are benchmarks and observations.
Here's LuxMark doing Sala. That's a pretty solid improvement. I would have hoped for a bit more, but I'm not complaining. Of course, the real strength of an Nvidia card over ATI is CUDA; the 670 is probably about six million times faster in After Effects.
Wait, crap. Check the GFX details; the 5870 is the first result, and the 670 is the second result. That's annoying. Cinebench is pretty dated these days, but the numbers went down! My precious numbers! Well, Kepler drivers are immature. Hopefully this changes over time.
Now, games. Everything was tested at 2560×1440 at the highest detail settings.
Starcraft 2 gained about 10 FPS (61 vs 50, average) on the 670, tested playing a Bly v. Tarson replay. So that was cool; you can see that Barefeats got the biggest improvement on a 570/580 from SC2 at those settings. Then I tried Civ 5; not only was it slower on the 670, it was kind of glitchy. Source games don't really tax the 5870, so it's hard to see much improvement in practical play, but the 670 was about 15% faster across Portal 2 and L4D2. L4D2 did have a weird bit of stutter when levels started. Dirt 2 ran great on both cards, although it remains a super-annoying game. Cities in Motion was, I think, slightly slower on the 670, but played fine. It gets jumpy with a huge map and the fastest game speed. The Sims 3 was just about as fast, too. Weirdly, Diablo 3 didn't improve at all — you'd think whatever worked for SC2 would work for D3, but no.
My wrapped version of Skyrim was the only game here that wasn't really playable on the 5870 at 2560/Ultra, so I was excited to see what the 670 did. It did nothing, actually; the game was still jumpy. If I had to cork sniff, I'd say the 5870 was more consistent — the 670 seemed to do a little better as long as you were standing still, and a little worse when you turned. This isn't really a reflection on either card.
Everything else worked fine. I'd heard people saying that Steam didn't work with PC GPUs — it did. All my non-game programs worked as well as before. Temperatures were about the same as before, and the 670 managed its fan just fine (it's quieter than the 5870, which made me nervous). Restarting in Windows showed off what the 670 could actually do, of course, although I found the difference marginally underwhelming in stuff like New Vegas and World of Tanks. But then, they're not taxing anyway, and the only tricky stuff for the 670 to add is anti-aliasing. Anyhow, the 670 in Mac OS is pretty much as fast as the 5870 except if you like Civ 5.
I ended up a little conflicted. The 670 is better than the 5870, depending on what you're doing, but not by that much in most cases except for CUDA. It's unsupported, and there were a couple glitches. The 5870, in comparison, is an OEM card that developers (presumably) test against, so you won't see much in the way of issues, and it's still the fastest OEM Mac GPU by a comfortable margin (over the iMac's 6970M). However, the 670 is definitely faster in Windows, and there's a lot of potential for the Mac drivers to improve and let the 670 really go nuts.
June 1, 2009
GTX 260/285/275 on MacPro
Tired of waiting for GTX285 mac edition to appear?
you can try it already on MacPro, you will need:
Gtx 260 Mac Flash
1) working efi nvidia card (7300gt/8800gt/gt120), ati might work too
Gtx 260 For Mac Os
2) some gtx 2xx card you wanna get working
3) install Injector pkg – link
Office 2013 for mac key. 4) do not reboot after previous step, and install drivers from quadro 4800 disk (you can find them in irc , irc.osx86.hu #gt200 channel, link in topic)
Gtx 260 Mac Pro
5) now reboot.
Gtx 260 For Macbook
if you are lucky enough, you will get this, some minor glitches yet, like wrong ram size(working on it), but it works:
