General Question on Types of Graphics Hardware

[JammyJams]

Setting up my first hackintosh I notice that there appear to be three distinct graphics modes that I can boot into:

1. Graphics handled by my NVIDIA card -- everything is smooth, high-res and responsive
2. Graphics handled by the UHD Intel Graphics on the CPU-- everything is smooth, high-res and responsive
3. Graphics handled by ??? -- only one low-res(x764px) option available, graphics are very slow with visible artifacts and refresh flickering.

Option three appears to be the fall-back option when there are problems loading the other two. My question is: what hardware is handling graphics in case three? If the first two players are out of the picture what is handling the rudimentary video output in case 3?

 

[slim.jim]

Depends on what the monitor is plugged into. A Nvidia card will run in VESA when there are no drivers for it.

 

[JammyJams]

Depends on what the monitor is plugged into. A Nvidia card will run in VESA when there are no drivers for it.

Very interesting. Thanks for the info. I see the same behavior in an old Late 2009 iMac where the Radeon graphics card failed. I disabled the Radeon driver kext and now the machine boots into a similarly slow and flickering video mode (albeit with a higher resolution). It is good to better understand how these things behave.

 

[slim.jim]

Very interesting. Thanks for the info. I see the same behavior in an old Late 2009 iMac where the Radeon graphics card failed. I disabled the Radeon driver kext and now the machine boots into a similarly slow and flickering video mode (albeit with a higher resolution). It is good to better understand how these things behave.

Most graphics cards have VESA mode. The computer will display using the highest possible mode available on the card. You can patch VESA modes to have higher resolutions available using Clover but I haven’t don’t that in years and frankly don’t remember how.