Best graphics card for current 12 core mac tower?

[Kenny Mosher]

I've got a PNY GTX580 3GB card in an '09 Mac Pro right now. Running OSX 10.7.4 and latest nVidia drivers... Here's the pros/cons of that configuration:

Pros:

It's cheaper than a Quadro 4000 and is a badass card if you also boot into Windows or Linux on the same system. CUDA performance is great -- a little better than the Quadro 4000, even when running on the Mac and given the other shortcomings I'm about to list. Under Windows, it screams, it smokes the Quadro 6000 in everything but OpenGL performance when in Windows. And that comes down to different driver optimizations.


Cons:

Drivers do not currently support proper power management or monitoring, fan control, etc.. for the card. It really does need a hack to work 100% properly. Drivers only see and allow for using 2GB of that 3GB onboard RAM. OpenGL performance is abysmal -- Cinebench scores are 30% less than the Quadro 4000 and so is overall OpenGL performance in apps like Maya, Lightwave, etc..

So... GTX580 makes a great secondary GPU in a PCIe expander for CUDA processing. Cheaper than a Tesla card and almost as good. Great primary card if you will be spending most of your time in Windows or Linux, but it's a dog in OSX unless we start hacking some config files and whatnot to make it work properly.



All things considered, I think the best card to buy for a current Mac Pro (or 2009 model, possibly '08 model if you still think it's worth spending money on) is the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition. It's officially supported, although the superior drivers come from nVidia, not Apple, so OSX updates tend to break compatibility with the latest "good" drivers until nVidia releases their updates a week or so later. IMO, not a big deal, on a production system no one should ever jump on a new OS update when first released.

The Quadro 4000 is a solid card, only takes one slot width and one 6-pin power connector. Two of them fit great inside a Mac Pro for additional CUDA acceleration in Resolve. If you need more 3D / OpenGL horsepower than what the Qudro 4000 gives you, then you probably should be looking at a Windows or Linux box for your software anyway. For 2D performance it does great. Personally, I think some of the ATI cards handle better under OSX for 2D performance and overall smoothness in running the GUI. The ATI 5870 isn't a bad card either and has decent OpenCL performance for FCPX. It's not on the supported list for CS6, but I believe you can change the text in the config file to make it work, just as you can with nVidia cards for CUDA. MPE does support OpenCL now, but it's not as complete or robust as the abilities with CUDA.

Hey Jeff
I just got the EVGA GTX 580 3GB as well as a used GT 120 for my 2008 3,1 Mac Pro. I have the 580 in slot 1, the Red Rocket in 2, ESata Card in 3, and the GT 120 in 4. I have an ATI Power Supply feeding power to the 580. For some reason I cannot see the 580 in the system profiler. I am running 10.7.4 and have the latest NVidia drivers installed. When I disconnect the power from the 580, all PCI cards show up, but when the 580 has power going to it, the 580 and RR don't appear in the profiler. Do you have any recommendations?

Thanks!!
Kenny

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Profiler doesn't recognize the 580, or most other non-supported video cards because of something Apple has done with the GDI interface in relation to loading video drivers. If a card registers itself as a primary video display device, but doesn't have a proper EFI table entry, then it gets ignored. Only way to fix this is to flash the card with a modified EFI image to inject proper support.

The other issue you're going to run into is the card locking itself into low-power mode. The PCIe link speed drops to 2.5GT/s (v1.x equivalent) and the card remains throttled down regardless of what you throw at it. The nVidia drivers support proper speed and power management for *some* card models if no EFI support is present, but you have to delete the Apple power management kext to see if your card will work. ...As Ben McCarthy stated above:

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

All things considered, the card works just OK, kinda like I stated in that post of mine you quoted.

You probably won't be able to see it in Profiler no matter what. Maybe you could send it to the MacVidCards guy and get a flashed EFI firmware. Make sure you have the latest drivers and extra CUDA package installed. You can see if Resolve will "see" it. I'm assuming you're running Resolve as it's the only app out there that would justify a configuration like this on the Mac. Also be aware that your Mac Pro 3,1 is going to be seriously bottlenecked by the 800MHz RAM. Don't expect to get real-time performance at 1080p unless you work in 8bit, probably not at all at 2K or higher. Your top two slots (3 and 4) are PCIe X4 v1.1. Not a big deal with your configuration, but it makes it difficult to install faster cards in those two slots. The Rocket works best in slot-2, if you move it up, it's bandwidth is cut in half. Which is probably OK in the '08 Mac Pro as the system isn't going to keep up with the Rocket anyway when it comes to direct transcodes.

[Kenny Mosher]

Thanks Jeff!!!!

[Nicos Ambatzis]

am facing the same dilemma with my MacPro (early 2008) with only one x16 slot. At the moment I am using Redcine x Pro and Color for grading having a Quadro 4500 double width card occupying the first two slots for monitoring a Redrocket in a x 4 slot running half speed (requires minimum x 8 one) and a Kona card into the next x 4 slot for video output, working with internal storage only (small projects). Now I am going to use an external storage, for instance two G-Speed es Pro units with 24 Tb and an ATTO controller card (thanks Jeff for the advice), which means I have to buy a Cyclone or a Cubix expander with 4 PCIe x 16 slots. The host adapter card requires a x 16 slot leading me to use the only one I have and move the Quadro 4500 into Cubix, plus the Redrocket and the ATTO leaving the Kona into Mac in a x 8 slot. But I am not very sure that this configuration will work up to a standard. The dilemma starts in case I would like to use Resolve. Of course the best thing will be to replace the Mac Pro, but I am waiting until Apple makes the move next year if it does??? In this situation what is the best way to go??? Replace the Q 4500 with two Quadro 4000 and the Kona with a 4K Decklink (one slot) or what????. Any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks.

[Jonathan S Strauss]

Honestly I think the Quadro 4000 has seen it's days with the GTX 570 HD Superclocked and GTX 570 2.5GB for mac at less than 50% the price. I have changed out almost every quadro card on our rental bays as they are just much slower and have had 0 problems with the pc or mac version of gtx 570 series. Must download Nvidia 10.7.4 drivers and do a minor edit to reenable open cl but once that is done it's good to go. Quadro needs same driver update to work properly as well. In resolve the performance with the 2.5GB card is substantially better than quadro 4000 (we actually got the same performance as 2x quadro 4000 in the mac) and in AE nearly twice as fast with ray trace engine (Do have to add file to PP/AE supported cards).

Check out the difference on ray trace application:

http://barefeats.com/aecs6.html

Just my opinion but I constantly make sure to have the absolute fastest machines available when we rent and have just been getting much better performance. I also have 3 GTX 580 3GB in cubix and they just smoke! (speaking of smoke)Smoke 2013 can use multiple GPU's as well and has been doing great (Cubix had two quadro 6000 in cubix at NAB with smoke running on there demo unit).

[Rob Anderson]

Here's what I've been running in my '09 Mac Pro tower (original write up by me too):
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1076970

**Just wanted to note and per Jeff's own suggestions above, we switched over to PC's for our main work horses. While these solutions are 'nice' on the Macs, the realities of the bang for the buck ratios on PC's make all of this somewhat nonsensical.

[Jonathan S Strauss]

I still get much better performance out of resolve on a mac even in the newest resolve 9 beta compared to a PC with much better internals. It will be awhile before PC version really catches up, if anyone has found a different outcome I'd love to hear. Also wanted to point out that while Jeff is still recommending the Quadro 4000 (makes sense as it works pretty much out of the box) resolve now recommends the GTX 570 even on mac starting in Resolve 9 (works fine in resolve 8) if you look at there configuration guide. I have talked to a few people that work there and they agree it works much better. Also remember Resolve 9 lets you use your processing card also as you GUI card so need for the GT 120 anymore.

[md rutherford]

This is a great thread. Thanks for the wise info Jeff.

I just bought a EVGA GTX580 off the shelf for my office machine (MacPro4,1) to replace my GTX 285.

I didn't have the 6 to 8 pin adapter, so sure enough, it didn't work w/o that. But from what i have read even w/ the adaptor the power draw seems a little worrisome to me.

So it looks like my options are:

1. to run the high-risk option and get the adapter, or
2. do what others are doing w/ the 580 and get an addtional PSU.

But my question is this:
Is there a reason why people aren't just upgrading the internal PSU in the mac pro?

[Jarek Zabczynski]

But my question is this:
Is there a reason why people aren't fust upgrading the internal PSU in the mac pro?

Because you can't. Apple doesn't use off the shelf power supplies.

[md rutherford]

^ Thanks for confirming that. The thought of an external additional PSU makes me cringe, so that won't be happening. I guess I will just toss this in my i7 hackinmac in my home office, and get a gtx 570 for my main work machine. That just leaves me with a perfectly good gtx 285, but oh well, life goes on.

Before I throw in the towel, are there any thoughts on the risk of using the 6-8 pin adapter (for the gtx580) in a mac pro?

In my system i am currently running:

macpro 4,1:
slot1 - gtx 285
slot2 - sas raid controller
slot3 - usb3/sata controller
slot4 - bm decklink