5K Resolution (5120x2880) via NVIDIA Drivers on Dell UltraSharp 27" Monitor

[benjackson]

ahh ok. Got it. Well it's still nice in 4K, and I was never gonna run it in 5K anyway as the text would be too small. I was just hoping for a nice retina resolution around 3300 resolution, but I'll stick with 3840. Thanks!

 

[benjackson]

it's probably not being ignored, it's just that nVidia did some super hacky stuff to make the Dell UP2715K work and the hack doesn't work with the HP. I have both monitors and the HP has never worked with my nVidia cards under any circumstances in 5K.

Hey LostVector.

So I have the HP 5K display working now, in 5K. The reason it wasn't before was that I also have a stupid 4K MST display (ASUS PQ321). The moment I switched that back to SST (30Hz) the 5K display gave me 5K goodness.

The issue I have NOW is that I am experimenting with putting an old GTX 680 in my machine to power the 4K MST and another 1440p monitor I have connected. My guess is that 2 MST displays off of one card (GTX 980) is too much for even this card. Under the macmini6,2 def the additional GPU doesn't work - all ports are inactive. I have done the port injection thing from shilohh to name my GPUs GFX1 but that had no effect other than enabling the ports and everything under MacPro6,1. So that's what it did. My GPUs both work, all ports, under MacPro6,1 so I'm hoping that if I delete the board-id for MacPro6,1 then it will also activate MST and I'll have the best of both worlds!

Thank God I came back to this thread and read though. It was you who reminded me that changing from Config1 to none is NOT sufficient to make MST work. I'll report back if I can make it work under MacPro as that's much preferred. Macmini also has cursor issues I've heard, which is really annoying in FCPX when doing fiddling precision work like audio level changes.

Thanks mate!

 

[benjackson]

it's probably not being ignored, it's just that nVidia did some super hacky stuff to make the Dell UP2715K work and the hack doesn't work with the HP. I have both monitors and the HP has never worked with my nVidia cards under any circumstances in 5K.

Oh also - when I have everything working, this isn't the case that the HP won't work no matter what. It does work for me so far under Macmini6,2, so I'm hoping it will as well when I get MacPro working by removing the board-ids. And funnily enough, my HP gets recognised in SwitchRes as the DELL model! It's called that! Super weird. So somehow that's how it's working as the 'super hacky' stuff NVIDIA did is applying to the HP. So don't give up on your HP, I'm running it in full 5K (actually a really nice 3360 x 1890 HiDPI, which is just about perfect). I don't get that option when it's not operating properly (ie. 4K).

 

[benjackson]

Well, I deleted the board-id for MacPro6,1 from the info.plist and rebuilt the kext cache. All that accomplished was bringing back a black screen for all ports. Not sure why, given Macmini doesn't have a board-id in there and that works fine OOTB, without any SSDT. To confirm, my SSDT is set to inject both GPUs as GFX1 as per shilohh's guide.

I'm at a bit of a loss now. I should be able to get out of black screen of death by injecting the ports for the GPU, even though MacPro6,1 is... ah it doesn't make sense.

Hmmmm....

 

[benjackson]

So update - I can make the MacPro6,1 sys def act like the Macmini one by:
• Changing board-id in Clover config.plist to be slightly different (say change the 6 at the end to a 7)
• Adding that altered/unique board-id to the PlatformSupport.plist in S/L/CoreServices

Now MST and 5K work, under a MacPro sys def.

So that's how Macmini works, it's board-id is something not picked up on by AGDP or somewhere else in the system, and thus some sort of 'default' kicks in that is far more functional, EXCEPT that only 1 GPU ports work at any one time. (If I unplug everything from GPU 1, I can make GPU 2 actually work, but only one or the other, which one works is actually kinda random)

Not sure if this helps anybody, but if you want 5K or MST to work but you really want the MacPro6,1 sys def (or any other for that matter), change the board-id to something weird and add that to PlatformSupport.plist. I have no idea what else this breaks (including continuing to have a faulty cursor like I have noticed sometimes on Macmini) but yeah.

Hasn't solved my problem though. At least I'm a bit closer to figuring out what it is that controls these things.

 

[LostVector]

Hey really interesting ... am curious about how to get my HP working but DisplayPort cables are a nightmare past 10 ft and I simply can't get dual high res signals over to it to test easily. If you've done it and also with an nVidia card there's probably some combo I missed. My Dell's are fantastic monitors tho and preferable to the HP so I'm not beating myself up over the HP yet.

What's your configuration of cards and monitors? I believe changing the board id would essentially have a similar effect to changing AGDP in the manner I described. It would also affect other parts of the OS ... possibly for the better or worse, hard to tell.

 

[benjackson]

Yeah except that I tried just changing AGDP and it had no effect. Basically MacPro6,1 was still getting 'processed' as different than Macmini. I haven't made it any further, I can't get MacPro6,1 with a new board-id to work out of the second GPU.

Old QNIX 27" 1440p display connected to DVI, ASUS PQ321 MST 4K connected to 3rd Display Port and the HP z27q 5K connected to the first and second Displayport... all from the GTX 980. The GTX 680, where I want to connect the ASUS and QNIX, is sitting there basically doing nothing right now, in the 4th PCI-e 16 slot. The 980 is in port 1 PCI-e 16.

What I want to discover the answer to is what about the MacPro6,1 board-id is activating some hidden functionality in the drivers to make both GPUs work, and what is it about when no valid board-id is given that makes both GPUs NOT work (but default to a specific functionality where MST DOES work as you would want it to). I want to combine both scenarios. I really thought getting into the info.plist. I was playing around with the various keys in there, for Config1 2 and 3... Instead of changing it to none or deleting altogether, what happened if I actually tried to USE those configs. So use the SSDT injection to name one GPU GFX0 and one GPU IGPU, then use Config3 (which I believe is for the latest iMac 5K) as a model to force GPU1 (980) to be the 5K display with 'special function' (there's some setting in the plist that looks like it could mean that) and to stop it 'unloading' other GPUs like it does for the MacPro6,1 2nd GPU that is portless.

But none of that worked, and I eventually wrecked the plist enough that it would no longer boot so had to go back to vanilla and then back to MacPro6,1 with an altered board-id to get my 5K back again. It's the ONLY scenarious where MST/5K will work - when the board-id you're using does NOT exist. But again, it's being picked up SOMEWHERE else than just the info.plist, as for me just deleting the board-id from info.plist does NOT activate MST/5K

Which I find weird given you and others have said that does work.

I'd love to know where else board-ids are used to control functionality of graphics drivers. THen i can continue my investigation.

 

[LostVector]

There's a lot of variables here so it's hard to zero in on any one problem but feedback is as follows.

It seems somewhat expected that MST for your Asus monitor and the 5k HP (which is a form of MST) would not work on the same card simultaneously. That's four displayport streams and I think the GTX 980's only have three.

To be clear, 5K on nVidia's is not something that I know how to make work well using just the AGDP edits. I've always had hangs on wake, cursor issues, etc, having to keep the monitor off until the computer boots, etc, using the nVidia web drivers. I probably could experiment more here, but AMD cards are clearly the Mac native hardware right now.

5k is only something I've been able to get working decently with ATI/AMD cards ... with the aforementioned AGDP edits.

 

[benjackson]

Yeah I'm just thinking out loud, not expecting you to answer me lol.

I don't expect both the MST monitors to work on the same card either, that's why I whacked my old 680 in there that ran the ASUS fine. I'm planning to JUST run the 5K monitor off of the 980, leaving it freer to do rendering etc. And it will then allow one card to be 5K and one card to run MST as I had previously had it running fine (but always with Macmini). The only reason I now don't like Macmini sys def (or my newly created MacPro with an alt board-id) is cos whilst everything else works, multi-GPUs don't seem to. If I could just figure out how to get the alt board-id sys defs (ie. the ones that don't exist anywhere in AGDP or anywhere else in other unknown plists) to output to both GPUs I'd not only be golden, but I'd have a pretty solid solution for everyone else trying to make these oddball displays work, or people who have issues with multi-monitors and black screens etc.

 

[benjackson]

right now, incidentally, I'm actually getting an ok result without using the 680 at all. the 980 IS running all 3 monitors, albeit with the 4K in SST (so 30Hz). I don't play games on it so 30Hz isn't altogether terrible. At least I'm getting the 5K running in a REALLY REALLY nice looking retina 3360 x 1890. That is super nice. What res do you run your 5K displays at? I'm finding myself moving more and more things over to the 5K display just cos it looks SO nice haha! So I have my emails and web browser over there, and most finder windows. On the 4K 32" I have whatever I'm working on, like Photoshop or FCPX or Resolve, then on the spare old low res 27" I have random other junk or screen sharing to my server, or a terminal window or whatever. Super sweet and surprisingly a lot more productive than I thought (I only just recently bought the 3rd monitor, the 5K). 3 monitors is the sweet spot for me.