Fermi support: Pink Elephant in the room?

[gregcotten]

What do you guys think? Anyone know about the mysterious 10.6.7 graphics drivers support? Time for this problem to be solved...

 

[MacMan]

What do you guys think? Anyone know about the mysterious 10.6.7 graphics drivers support? Time for this problem to be solved...

From what I've read, it still doesn't include any Fermi drivers.

 

[mwparrish]

Can you be more specific? Fermi support works for 4xx series / GF10x parts. If graphics enabler doesn't work, just add a HEX string to you com.apple.Boot.plist and make sure the device-id is in the NVGF100Hal.kext.

The problem is that while NVGF100Hal.kext works with the 5xx series / GF1xx parts, GeForce.kext has not been updated to do the same which means you get no QE/CI, OpenGL, Video drivers loading, just basic video adapter support.

 

[rabbit74]

Fermi support works for 4xx series

The nVidia apple fermi driver only works for 470 and 480.

It is a very large Pink elephant.

To say the driver works for all series 4xx is overstating quite a stretch.

Perhaps a more relevant question is: Is x86 architecture in it's death throws?

rabbit.

 

[Maryus3D]

I don't understand at all. Who's fault eventually? Apple or nVidia? nVidia doesn't want to make cards for macs or Apple doesn't accept nvidia anymore for some stupid reasons.

 

[tonymacx86]

Pink Elephant? More like 800 Pound Gorilla

4xx is "supported" with full resolution switching and QE/CI. But ya the Fermi Freeze. Some people have it worse than others- as a matter of fact, I've been testing the Zotac Silent 430 for a few days now with no freezes. Also, my PNY 450 on Gigabyte P55M-UD2 is doing ok with a Gigabyte .rom injection. At least it only freezes once every 3-5 days.

At some point, NVIDIA should release new drivers- right now the drivers are meant for 1 graphics card- the Quadro 4000 for Mac.

But there are a lot of ideas on what it could be. Some say the 4xx cards hardware implementation is flawed- and power levels are set to idle too low- that's why kernel panics and freezeups occur. Who knows. I'm still using my cards and testing to see if we can come up with a permanent fix.

See here (38+ pages) for details: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=8015

 

[lukarak]

Ye, they work for the 'normal' Quadro 4000 card. Also fermi, GF100, but with no mac firmware. Unfortunately its only 2GB and 256 shaders, so half a chip.

 

[iWingzero]

On bootup and login my animations for opening say the applications folder seams a bit sluggish but around an hour later everything is smooth as butter is very weird.

Almost as if it "warms up"

Also a GTX 480 should be getting much more than 33fps in cinebench much much more.

 

[mwparrish]

4xx is "supported" with full resolution switching and QE/CI. But ya the Fermi Freeze. Some people have it worse than others- as a matter of fact, I've been testing the Zotac Silent 430 for a few days now with no freezes. Also, my PNY 450 on Gigabyte P55M-UD2 is doing ok with a Gigabyte .rom injection. At least it only freezes once every 3-5 days.

On second though, I have seen mostly 480/470s that work great. I bought a GT 430 which is a GF108 part and it works flawlessly with an EFI string. Never a single KP that's video related. I did have 1 KP after I imported and edited about 20GB of 720P HD video. I believe that was due to a memory leak in iMovie though as 6.5 of 8 GB were used up and when I close iMovie it took a KP dive. Hasn't happened since the latest update to iMovie either.

So, that being said, my GT 430 is stellar. The GTS 450 and the 460s seems to have the most issues. Remember, the 460 uses a GF104 part that has more CUDA cores per SM than the GF100 part as well as double the schedulers per SM. This is likely why the 460 have issues along with the 5xx/GF11x parts. The modified architecture has not been incorporated into the drivers since the only Fermi Mac offering is the GF1xx based Quadro 4000.

I may be restating the obvious, but for now, I'd bet on the GT 430, GTX 470, or 480 and avoid chips with a modified architecture from the original GF100 layout.

NVIDIA mentioned to me that they do not support and have no plans to support any of these cards in their drivers despite the inclusion of the device-ids for some of them. So let's hope they revise the Quadro 4000 or release a GTX 5xx for Mac like they did with the 285... and soon. I'd love to use my 580 instead of the 430. Swapping out a jumper to reboot to game in Windows isn't so bad for me... but explaining it the the wife when she wants to use it...

 

[lukarak]

On bootup and login my animations for opening say the applications folder seams a bit sluggish but around an hour later everything is smooth as butter is very weird.

Almost as if it "warms up"

Also a GTX 480 should be getting much more than 33fps in cinebench much much more.

I'm getting 19 or 20 FPS in cinebench with GTX 480. So don't complain