NVIDIA 'Pascal' Graphics Drivers Released: Buyer's Guide Updated!

[sladej]

On March 3rd I sent a pretty desperate (and poorly worded, apologies) group email out to Jensen H. Huang (CEO of Nvidia) and Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) essentially begging for Pascal chipset support on Macs. I have read hundreds of pages of threads waiting on Pascal support for Mac all over the web, lot of dead ends, lot of sad people giving up and selling chipsets. In an effort I considered to be completely futile, I decided to start digging around and seeing if I could find contacts and reach out to at least one of these guys, maybe they’d simply delete the email, maybe it’d never get through a filter, or best case scenario they’d at least forward the email to someone who could at least write the idea on a post it note.

What happened was even better. Tonight the CEO of Nvidia emailed me back informing me that my email was the decision Pascal has come to MacOS, that previously he had no idea it was wanted. Thanks to communities like this, the eGPU community, the creative editors and VFX artists and the colorists over at LiftGammaGain.com, I was able to present that there was certainly a corner of the world that wanted this. Though I haven’t heard back from Tim Cook and likely won’t, I can’t say how much it means to hear back from Nvidia’s CEO so candidly. Reaching out made this happen, and I never thought the day would come. My initial effort was basically a "eh can't hurt to send an email".

I really do get the notion that Nvidia’s team wants to be out here with us, delivering support for MacOS probably doesn’t make nearly the impact on their revenue that the gamers or deep learning crowd out there would, but the fact that they did this for us is incredible. Continue to show Nvidia your love, people!

Excuse the cheesey long first email, I was really just trying to paint a picture of how important Nvidia/Mac usability is thru the only angle I’m familiar with: filmmaking (I'm no hackintosh aficianado, I only understand how important Nvidia cards are for software like Resolve, the Adobe suite, etc). Was an honor to hear back from him, I can’t believe my email is what finally made it happen after a year or more of our communities starting to lose hope.

http://imgur.com/a/ohWpz

Great job reaching out to Huang and Cook, and it's really interesting to see his response. There's actually at least one other case of someone reaching out to Huang about Pascal drivers and getting a response back in December:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/nvidia-gtx-1080.1971528/page-16#post-24011049

 

[gurji]

Meanwhile I'm getting 62fps in Cinebench with my EVGA 1070

 

[plasticuser]

Today I installed an Asus Turbo GTX 1080 Ti 11G in my hackintosh. I had to update Clover, and do both parts of fix #6. It has about the same performance as 2x R9 280X in FCPX, and frame rates in games like World of Tanks have gone from ~45 to ~95. Night shift works. Audio over HDMI works. Multiple displays work (1x4K, 2x2K).

Very happy. Thanks for all the persuading, arm-twisting and waiting patiently you all did for me - I didn't even know this would be an option until it was

 

[Fl0r!an]

Meanwhile i'm getting 62fps in Cinebench with my EVGA 1070

Don't use Cinebench. It's like installing Windows 3.1 for benchmarking a 2017 gaming rig.

 

[Stork]

Don't use Cinebench. It's like installing Windows 3.1 for benchmarking a 2017 gaming rig.

Use Heaven and/or Valley for graphics benchmarking.

 

[RandomTech]

Don't want to flood here but my old Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 costs me $160 year ago (used). Current price about $100. and it reach 87 in Cnebench and 12375 in Luxmark 3.1 ball render 'Pascal' is just slightly faster, so don't need to replace card in nearest 5 years or so...

its also a pure OpenCL card which OS X loves, on my GTX 980TI rig I went back to El Capitan because of many graphical glitches with Nvidia web driver 10.12.4 (all Sierra in general).
On my 280X rig Sierra works like charm and any OpenCL benchmark matches what 980Ti scores (but faster in FCPX), so yeah, its very wise to keep those fast OpenCl AMD cards for our Hackintoshs as OS X prefers and fully supports only AMD cards for now

 

[roto31]

This is great news. I know these are aimed at the Hackintosh crowd but I am also thinking instead of spending a boatload of cash on the new GPU that was released for the MacPro I might get a couple of these. One for my MacPro 5,1 and another for my Dell Precision 690 (24GB of RAM, 256GB mSata SSD, dual Xeon 5355s) I have running El Capitan (works awesome so far! - stopped at El Capitan dues to issues on installing Sierra). I do the core of the video work on my 5,1 and then move it to the 690 for the final rendering (shared network drive). New GPUs would really speed up the process.

 

[king6cong]

Ahh bummer. I just installed El Capitan to get full accelleration in FCP X with 970GTX - and damn its fast compared to Sierra. Do you guys have Metal support with those 1060/1070/1080 cards?

Running 5K Dell on Sierra also causes Mouse Pointer to f@ck up, needing to do clumsy workarounds. Hopefully this is fixed with the new drivers. Hopefully someone will know/test?

hi, sierra with dell 2715k dual monitor setup and suffer same mouse pointer problem. can you share what's the workaround?

 

[carlos.33193]

Can someone with a 1080 Ti please run BruceX and post their results.

I'm considering if it's worth to upgrade my 980 Ti classified overclocked to 1500mHz, I currently have El Capitan and run ~26 seconds BruceX, and ~55 seconds in Sierra.

 

[Petronius]

my pascal does not like to run, after booting up half way, the screen goes black... i have to leave the webdriver disabled at boot to get into my system...