Best graphics card for current 12 core mac tower?

[Josh Beadle]

And Jeff continues to be the gold standard for technical information

[James Drake]

Jeff has the best knowledge on the cards for sure.

Just to throw in my random opinion, I'm running a GTX 570 on my Mac system (10.7.3) and am pleased with the performance. Of course, I don't own a Quadro card to know what ultimate GPU speed looks like... but switching between software acceleration and GPU MPE is a big difference.

[Will Keir]

Josh, maybe you can give him the link too?

Jeff Kilgroe has written extensively and accurately on this topic

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Take a look at this thread:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1360927

Seems to be a lot of happy GTX 5xx users. I'm waiting for a power cable for my card, I'll post my results (moving from the default ATI-card)...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Rounded up two new cards to add to the mix -- EVGA GTX570 w/2.5GB and ASUS GTX 560 w/1.5GB.

Preliminary test results mostly confirm what I've found before. The cards work just fine, but the drivers don't bother to interface with them and control them properly for power management, fan speed, etc.. The Apple EFI is specifically locking out unapproved or non-AEFI video display adapters from logging entries in the EFI device table and the EFI system won't pull a BIOS entry (as it normally would) for these non-AEFI display cards. So we get errors in Profiler when we try to view the PCIe adapter list with one of these cards installed.

Some of the cards are being locked to 2.5GT/s interface mode, but not all. It's not a PCIe 1.x downgrade as the MacVidCards guy is claiming, the cards are still interfacing in v2.0 mode. But most of these cards, nVidia and ATI, will fall back to 2.5GT/s transaction mode when in idle or low-power state, as Subhadip Sen pointed out earlier in this discussion. The OS is holding them there without proper driver interaction and/or proper EFI table entries. I also find it curious that the same restrictions to the EFI table are in place when entering the bootcamp loader and subsequently starting Windows. Crippled performance in Windows on a Mac when running these cards. Nice, Apple...

Now for the curious part... We're not seeing this issue on Hackintosh systems. Most boot loaders on the Hackinmac systems like unibeast/multibeast, etc.. hash together an EFI table of sorts from UEFI and BIOS entries on the PC. It pulls the data from these video cards and there becomes a proper table entry for them. The cards work as they should in OSX on a Hackintosh! But on a real Mac Pro, the cards are crippled. So, there are a few ways around this...

1> flash the cards with a proper EFI to enable the missing control. That's what this MacVidCards guy is doing with his and he seems to be doing a pretty good job. Of course, he can only go as far and enable as much as what the current nVidia drivers will allow. For example, he's not going to squeeze more than 2GB of usable RAM out of a Quadro 6000 under OSX.

2> Leave the card be and hack the nVidia drivers. By doing this, we don't get the EFI boot screens and other pre-OS functionality / menus / etc.. Can't have the ability to profile the installed PCIe cards and other little issues will still be there. We would have to re-do a new hack each time OSX updates and nVidia releases new drivers. This is hardly an efficient solution.

3> Retro-fit an EFI profiling utility that can intervene at boot time or shortly after and construct proper EFI table entries where needed. Essentially doing on the Mac what is being done on the PC Hackintosh. I don't know if this is possible and how much access without major hacking is possible. So far it seems like option #1 is the way to go unless #3 proves to be a lot easier than I imagine it is. I'm pretty sure we'd be treated to a panic screen if we tried to mod the EFI table once the OS takes hold.


I really don't understand the purpose behind crippling the display adapters. This is an OSX 10.7.x thing where nVidia has actually included support for these cards in the drivers, but has crippled them if they don't have a proper Apple EFI installed. I wonder if this is per an Apple request or what's going on. I'm thinking it is an Apple restriction as apprently ATI cards have the same issues, but I haven't done any testing with them. Previously in 10.6.x, we could mod a kext file or two and the cards would work just fine after flashing them, some even without flashing (just no pre-OS EFI functionality). The new drivers on 10.7 don't have the same configuration files to mod, it's all in-built into the drivers. Although, config files may be tucked inside one of the driver files and I just haven't poked around in there to try and find that stuff yet.

I might poke around a bit more with the drivers, but I think most of my work here is done. So when it all comes down to it, I recommend the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition right now, until something better comes along.

If you want to go a different route and try to squeeze some better CUDA and gaming / light-duty OpenGL performance out of a card, I would go for the GTX570, possibly a GTX580 that has been flashed by the MacVidCards guy. If you're running a Hackintosh, the GTX570 and GTX580 cards are where it's at right now, no mods required.

[William Schultz]

My flashed GTX570 2.5GB should be arriving from Macvidcards today. Will try to get it into my system as soon as I can and write up a few notes for everyone that is curious about the performance of it under the latest OS. Thanks for all of the useful information as usual Jeff.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

My flashed GTX570 2.5GB should be arriving from Macvidcards today. Will try to get it into my system as soon as I can and write up a few notes for everyone that is curious about the performance of it under the latest OS. Thanks for all of the useful information as usual Jeff.

No problem. :) And your flashed 570 should work great!

FWIW, it seems that those on OSX 10.6.8 should stick with the GTX4xx series and if you want to run the GTX5xx series, you need to move to OSX 10.7.3 or later.

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Some of the cards are being locked to 2.5GT/s interface mode, but not all.

How do I check if my card runs as it should?

[Ryan Browne]

Jeff Kilgroe has written extensively and accurately on this topic

Could you provide a link?

[Ben McCarthy]

If anyone has a GTX 570 with or without the EFI rom soldered you can try and delete the:

AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext" from your Extensions folder

This causes the card to power down when not under load