GTX-570 still good option?

[Jean Déraps]

Paul, are you saying that you're using the native PC GTX 570s unflashed for Mac and they're working? If this is true, i want them too!!!

[Jeff Kilgroe]

How are the 570 cards working with 10.8? What/ if anything / does it show in the system profiler?

[Paul Provost]

os 10.8

[Dwaine Maggart]

They work fine in 10.8 with the native driver, and ID properly in the System Profile. They will also work fine in 10.7.3 and 10.7.4 with downloaded NVIDIA drivers (NOT the native drivers). 10.7.3 needs 270.00.00f01 and 10.7.4 needs 270.00.00f06. If you use a card that is not EFI flashed as the only card, you will not see any of the boot process until OSX loads the driver and gets the card going. This would bother me personally ( I want to see what it's doing during the entire boot process) but assuming the system boots normally, it's not a big deal for folks, apparently. If you have a dedicated Mac GUI card and are only using the PC GTX cards as Resolve GPU cards, the boot thing is a total non-issue.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

What does it show for these cards in the PCI cards section of Profiler?

Are they operating with proper fan speed control and power throttling? The nVidia drivers for 10.7.3 and 10.7.4 *DO NOT* properly control the fans or provide power management functionality for these cards, nor do those driver sets allow the cards to run at full speed. You must hack and re-flash the firmware on the cards to enable those features. In 10.6.x, you can modify the graphics power management kext file, but this file is deprecated and removed in 10.7.x, turning over full control to the driver. nVidia's drivers to coincide with 10.7.4 improved on the 10.7.3 drivers, but still don't support a lot of card functionality.

In 10.7.x, many configurations are restricted to using 2GB of VRAM. 3GB GTX580 cards, 2.5GB 570 cards, Quadro 6000, etc.. all report 2GB RAM. I see his is reporting the full 2.5GB, that's already a promising sign. Curious to see if the driver will throttle the cards up or if they're stuck in low-power, half-speed limbo.

Another promising sign is that the cards are functioning under 10.8 with the native driver. That's a huge step forward compared to what we went through with the last couple point releases of 10.7.

[Jean Déraps]

I'm looking into getting a GTX 570 or perhaps one of the newer GTX 670 cards. Anyone have an idea of whether the 670 is worth the premium over the 570 and whether it will actually work the same as the 570?

Edit: I forgot to mention that I would be putting the card in a MacPro 2008 running Mountain Lion....

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Forget the 670. Even if the driver support was there, which it is not, it would be a poor match for the older hardware. For CUDA acceleration tasks, the only real reason to install one of the unsupported nVidia cards, the 670 is no faster than the 570.

The 570 is a good choice and seems to play well with the Mac at this time. Of course, being an unsupported card, that situation may change with subsequent releases of OSX.

[Jean Déraps]

Thanks for the heads up Jeff! If Apple had updated their MacPro offerings recently, I would have probably upgraded, but like many others I'm playing the waiting game for the supposedly next 'insanely great' version of the pro lineup...