<< Solved >> No GPU acceleration on Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H, Core i7-4790K, GeForce GTX 970 4GB, Catalina

[ilyad]

Hi,

I was zooming around on my high-sierra hackintosh until we updated the system without paying attention a couple of weeks ago.
After restarting it did not get further than the Gigabyte bootloader splash screen.

I operated deeply on the system and noticed that the EFI bootloader had become corrupted. I patched things up so that system ran normal again.
Whatever I tried, following all the good reads here, I could not get the graphics-card acceleration to work. It kept lagging..

I decided we might have better luck with a more recent OS, so followed the upgrade path.
I upgraded clover, carefully updated the kexts and migrated to Lilu and WhateverGreen.

The installation went smoothly and using Benjamin Dobell's excellent update script I successfully updated the Nvidia webdrivers.

After first installation the graphics card was not recognized. After carefully reading through the graphics setup & troubleshooting post (https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/read-me-first-graphics-setup-troubleshooting.183617/) I noticed I had the:
"nv_disable=1"
activated. I removed this line and restarted.

Now everything seems to work. About this mac properly identifies "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4GB" and the panels in system preferences correctly show CUDA is properly loaded and the NVIDIA Web Driver is up to date.

However, whenever I try to do something GPU specific nothing happens. i.e. If I run a benchmark program such as CineBench or Heaven, nothing happens. Cinebench does not see the graphics card. Heaven just switches to full screen black and nothing happens.
Apps like Blender just crash with a reference to the GPU (1 org.blenderfoundation.blender 0x0000000110f03526 GPU_context_create + 214)

Also, when I used to boot, towards the end of the osx boot sequence there would be short interlude in which the ventilators of the graphics card would temporarily go full speed, that is no longer the case.

I don't really know where to look or what to try anymore, so if you have help or tips, that would be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
ilyad

 

[theruck]

nvidia GPUs not supported in Catalina. High Sierra was latest supported OS with Nvidia releasing its web drivers. You need to swap your GPU for an AMD one or run without any acceleration - your current state.