Nvidia Drivers for Mojave 10.14 Not Available, no WorkAround works well

[Gigamaxx]

I completely lost faith in Nvidia when they were unable to fix the UI lag that was introduced with High Sierra. I waited three revisions of macOS. They still didn't fix it. That was it, I sold my GTX 1080 and went with a Vega 56. This was near the height of the crypto mining craze and I paid far more than I should have, but I didn't care.

Since switching, everything has been smooth sailing. Buttery smooth.

Even if Nvidia were to release Mojave drivers tomorrow, it's a crap shot whether the drivers will work well.

I took a beating when Sierra beta came out and I was testing RX 460-480 cards and claiming they were smooth and had the benefit of native drivers. Nvidia fanatics were insistent that the cards did not run natively since you needed IGPU to be activated or you would get black screen. Each update the cards worked better and better and now they are the preferred choice by Hackintoshers that want to live on the bleading edge of software betas. Things sure have changed over the last 2 years and looking at the AMD10,000Controlletkext there are about 25 device IDs so apple is or will be testing many new Vega cards in the future.

 

[pastrychef]

I took a beating when Sierra beta came out and I was testing RX 460-480 cards and claiming they were smooth and had the benefit of native drivers. Nvidia fanatics were insistent that the cards did not run natively since you needed IGPU to be activated or you would get black screen. Each update the cards worked better and better and now they are the preferred choice by Hackintoshers that want to live on the bleading edge of software betas. Things sure have changed over the last 2 years and looking at the AMD10,000Controlletkext there are about 25 device IDs so apple is or will be testing many new Vega cards in the future.

I'll be the first to admit that I was a long time advocate of Nvidia cards. I loved the performance and the lower TDP (as compared to ATI/AMD offerings). I also had my fair share of ATI cards die on me in old Macs dating back to the PowerPC days. But the decline in driver quality was very evident and happened quite rapidly. I really wanted and hoped that Nvidia would eventually get it right, but they never did...

 

[Gigamaxx]

I'll be the first to admit that I was a long time advocate of Nvidia cards. I loved the performance the lower TDP (as compared to ATI/AMD offerings). I also had my fair share of ATI cards die on me in old Macs dating back to the PowerPC days. But the decline in driver quality was very evident and happened quite rapidly. I really wanted and hoped that Nvidia would eventually get it right, but they never did...

It would be nice if they updated the new MacPro with Nvidia 2xxx series cards that would open things up nicely for everybody. Nvidia makes very good cards but Apple has been AMD specific for over 5 years and their Kexts seem to show more cards on the way. My neighbors Nvidia laptop GPU burned out and he never got the recall for his 2010 MacBook Pro. He contacted support and the recall had expired 6 months before he called and he pleaded with them told them he never got the notice and it was registered at the same address. He also mentioned all his other Apple products and they found a new logic board and fixed it for him. My 2009 MacBook with the same GPU took a dump about 6 months ago as well. So it’s not limited to just ATI cards. Apple has terrible cooling systems just look at the iMacPro those Vega Carda have a heatsink and rely on the system fans to cool. Recipe for a $4000 disaster after the warranty expires.

 

[pastrychef]

It would be nice if they updated the new MacPro with Nvidia 2xxx series cards that would open things up nicely for everybody. Nvidia makes very good cards but Apple has been AMD specific for over 5 years and their Kexts seem to show more cards on the way. My neighbors Nvidia laptop GPU burned out and he never got the recall for his 2010 MacBook Pro. He contacted support and the recall had expired 6 months before he called and he pleaded with them told them he never got the notice and it was registered at the same address. He also mentioned all his other Apple products and they found a new logic board and fixed it for him. My 2009 MacBook with the same GPU took a dump about 6 months ago as well. So it’s not limited to just ATI cards. Apple has terrible cooling systems just look at the iMacPro those Vega Carda have a heatsink and rely on the system fans to cool. Recipe for a $4000 disaster after the warranty expires.

My ATI card failures date back to two G4 iBooks and continued to X1900 in MacPro1,1 to MacBook Pro X1600. All those failures left a very sour taste in my mouth...

Then I switched to 8800 GT and GeForce 9400M based Mac Mini and MacBook then to GTX 680. Of those, the only one that gave me problems was the 8800 GT which I revived by baking. I got a GTX 980 for my last MacPro5,1 and kept it when I built my first hack and upgraded to GTX 1080. All ran reliably up until the day I sold them.

One of the reasons why I always avoided iMacs was their lack of cooling. Also, dusting out the innards were always a pain due to how difficult they are to take apart. Due to past experiences, I learned to only purchase laptops that do not have dGPUs.

That being said, it doesn't matter how great and reliable they are if they are hobbled by shoddy drivers or, worse, no drivers are available. At this point, you'd have to be completely nuts to invest in an Nvidia card for use with macOS.

Also, with my current Vega 56, I've tweaked it by undervolting the GPU and overclocked the HBM and GPU resulting in a much cooler running card that performs really great.

 

[the_gael]

If the AMD Cards are supported I think I will sell my nVidia 1050's - I have already removed them from 2 of my Hacks and replaced with a GT640 and GT740 which don't require drivers but they don't have DisplayPort which I prefer and which allows 60mhz refresh rates on macOS.

 

[pastrychef]

What is necessary to make these cards work with macOS? Or do they just work when you plug them in OOTB.

Under most circumstances, just installing Lilu and WhateverGreen are enough.

 

[the_gael]

Under most circumstances, just installing Lilu and WhateverGreen are enough.

thank you

 

[jaymonkey]

I completely lost faith in Nvidia when they were unable to fix the UI lag that was introduced with High Sierra. I waited three revisions of macOS. They still didn't fix it. That was it, I sold my GTX 1080 and went with a Vega 56. This was near the height of the crypto mining craze and I paid far more than I should have, but I didn't care.

Since switching, everything has been smooth sailing. Buttery smooth.

Even if Nvidia were to release Mojave drivers tomorrow, it's a crap shot whether the drivers will work well.

@pastrychef,

I am very much considering making the jump to team red, my desk top FCP-X video editing system has a Gigabyte AIO Water cooled GTX 980-Ti which at the time cost me a fortune .... although quote usable in High Sierra the UI stutters occasionally, especially when vertically scrolling web pages using the magic mouse. For a long time I thought it was a mouse issue but having read about the issues with Nvidia Drivers in High Sierra I now know the real cause.

Of course I'm in the same boat as many Nvidia users here waiting for Nvidia to pull their fingers out of their arse and release Mojave Metal 2 Drivers ... If they do and they do a good job then the Nvidia cards have the potential to still be a good investment but with no official announcement and looking at Nvidia's track record with MacOS Web Drivers I don't hold a lot of hope.

Was thinking of getting Vega 56 or 64 ... the only thing that put's me off them is the amount of heat that they can potently dump in to the system under full load ... was looking at the AIO Water Cooled Vega 64 cards but they are hard to find and still command a high price used, but having read your success in under-volting and fine-tuning the fan profiles I assume that this is not an issue for you ?

Have been trying to find real world benchmarks for Vega 56 v 64 under MacOS to see if it's worth spending the extra money on a Vega 64 ... but so far have not really found anything meaningful. I see your running the MSI Vega 56 .. are you just using lilu & WhatEverGreen, did it need the frame buffer patching ?

I have a 34" 21:9 3440x1440 main monitor connected via DP and a secondary 1080P monitor connected via HDMI, both connected to the 980-Ti, my IGPU (HD 4600) is enabled and running a headless ig-platform-id so i don't think i'd have too many issues updating.

Cheers
Jay

 

[pastrychef]

@pastrychef,

I am very much considering making the jump to team red, my desk top FCP-X video editing system has a Gigabyte AIO Water cooled GTX 980-Ti which at the time cost me a fortune .... although quote usable in High Sierra the UI stutters occasionally, especially when vertically scrolling web pages using the magic mouse. For a long time I thought it was a mouse issue but having read about the issues with Nvidia Drivers in High Sierra I now know the real cause.

Of course I'm in the same boat as many Nvidia users here waiting for Nvidia to pull their fingers out of their arse and release Mojave Metal 2 Drivers ... If they do and they do a good job then the Nvidia cards have the potential to still be a good investment but with no official announcement and looking at Nvidia's track record with MacOS Web Drivers I don't hold a lot of hope.

Was thinking of getting Vega 56 or 64 ... the only thing that put's me off them is the amount of heat that they can potently dump in to the system under full load ... was looking at the AIO Water Cooled Vega 64 cards but they are hard to find and still command a high price used, but having read your success in under-volting and fine-tuning the fan profiles I assume that this is not an issue for you ?

Have been trying to find real world benchmarks for Vega 56 v 64 under MacOS to see if it's worth spending the extra money on a Vega 64 ... but so far have not really found anything meaningful. I see your running the MSI Vega 56 .. are you just using lilu & WhatEverGreen, did it need the frame buffer patching ?

I have a 34" 21:9 3440x1440 main monitor connected via DP and a secondary 1080P monitor connected via HDMI, both connected to the 980-Ti, my IGPU (HD 4600) is enabled and running a headless ig-platform-id so i don't think i'd have too many issues updating.

Cheers
Jay

I understand perfectly. I too am always concerned about heat and power consumption from GPUs due to all my previous video card failures. This is why I still hope that Nvidia will eventually release some good drivers. I am not a "fanboy" of either AMD or Nvidia. I simply want what works best and what works reliably.

When I was faced with the choice of either switching to a Vega 56 or 64, the TDP played a very important roll in my decision making. TDP has influenced my decisions in the past, I chose GTX 980 over GTX 980 Ti and GTX 1080 over GTX 1080 Ti entirely because of TDP. I did the same this time around... I went with Vega 56 over 64.

I have always preferred blower style GPU coolers because I didn't like the idea of keeping all that hot air inside the computer case. The last time I had an "open" style cooler on a GPU was with a GTX 680 and it dramatically increased my CPU temps in my old MacPro5,1. Since then, I have always chosen blower style coolers or reference design models.

After I got my Vega 56, I ran it at completely stock settings for a bit and it ran quite warm. Once I was confident that my card was not defective, I took to voiding the warranty and took the cooler off so that I could replace the stock thermal compound with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut, a liquid metal thermal compound. I detailed my experience here.

Then, when the VGTab utility was released, I started messing around a bit with undervolting and overclocking. I went through quite a lot of trial and error before I settled on what I felt was a 100% reliable, best performing setting for my particular video card. If you look at my Z370 build thread (link is below in my signature), you will find benchmark results from when my Vega 56 was completely stock. For benchmark results from different tweaked results, please see this post.

Now, I have an extremely quiet, great performing, and relatively cool running Vega 56. Under normal circumstances (with my window open and/or with TV noise in the background), I can't hear the difference between when my system is sleeping or awake. When the Vega is pushed and it heats up, the fan does ramp up and will be audible but it's much better than it was before I did all the tweaking and the noise is much less unbearable. I can't be more happy with the results.

As a FCPX user, I'm sure you will see great performance improvements with a Vega. Also, for FCPX usage, I don't think it would be as hot as when running the latest FPS game for hours on end. Btw, as a user who has had both Nvidia and AMD, yes, your UI stutters are entirely due to the terrible Nvidia web drivers.

 

[N8261D]

I understand perfectly. I too am always concerned about heat and power consumption from GPUs due to all my previous video card failures. This is why I still hope that Nvidia will eventually release some good drivers. I am not a "fanboy" of either AMD or Nvidia. I simply want what works best and what works reliably.

When I was faced with the choice of either switching to a Vega 56 or 64, the TDP played a very important roll in my decision making. TDP has influenced my decisions in the past, I chose GTX 980 over GTX 980 Ti and GTX 1080 over GTX 1080 Ti entirely because of TDP. I did the same this time around... I went with Vega 56 over 64.

I have always preferred blower style GPU coolers because I didn't like the idea of keeping all that hot air inside the computer case. The last time I had an "open" style cooler on a GPU was with a GTX 680 and it dramatically increased my CPU temps in my old MacPro5,1. Since then, I have always chosen blower style coolers or reference design models.

After I got my Vega 56, I ran it at completely stock settings for a bit and it ran quite warm. Once I was confident that my card was not defective, I took to voiding the warranty and took the cooler off so that I could replace the stock thermal compound with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut, a liquid metal thermal compound. I detailed my experience here.

Then, when the VGTab utility was released, I started messing around a bit with undervolting and overclocking. I went through quite a lot of trial and error before I settled on what I felt was a 100% reliable, best performing setting for my particular video card. If you look at my Z370 build thread (link is below in my signature), you will find benchmark results from when my Vega 56 was completely stock. For benchmark results from different tweaked results, please see this post.

Now, I have an extremely quiet, great performing, and relatively cool running Vega 56. Under normal circumstances (with my window open and/or with TV noise in the background), I can't hear the difference between when my system is sleeping or awake. When the Vega is pushed and it heats up, the fan does ramp up and will be audible but it's much better than it was before I did all the tweaking and the noise is much less unbearable. I can't be more happy with the results.

As a FCPX user, I'm sure you will see great performance improvements with a Vega. Also, for FCPX usage, I don't think it would be as hot as when running the latest FPS game for hours on end. Btw, as a user who has had both Nvidia and AMD, yes, your UI stutters are entirely due to the terrible Nvidia web drivers.

Does anybody know if the GT740 SC is supported in High Sierra? I have heard that I won't need web drivers as it is natively supported. i have also heard it is natively supported in Mojave. Any help to verify this information is greatly appreciated.