GPU's for the insane (a.k.a. Mac Pro users like me

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ima747(Posted 2012) [#1]
So I shopped up some shinny new 27" WQHD screens to replace my cheapo 21s, and of course when you get a massive bump in resolution you want to ooo and aaah over some shinny games. 2560x1440 is apparently a bit much for for my Radeon 5770 in a fair number of things (when bells and whistles are applied at least), which put me in the market for a new graphics card. According to Apple the 5870 is the only upgrade (there's the Quadro 4000 but silly expensive and it's really only good for the CUDA cores actual performance in games is apparently less than the 5770...). However after doing some research it turns out they actually snuck NVIDIA GeForce drivers into lion, and have been improving them with each revision since. Further NVIDIA actually puts out their own mac drivers now... this means you can buy a stock NVIDIA chipset card and it will work in a MacPro out of the box. No hacking, no flashing. And if you bump up to the NVIDIA drivers you get full cuda support as well as yet better performance... much shopping later I ordered up an EVGA GTX 670 and voila! crazy performance for less than the cost of the apple 5870 which is a bit long in the tooth and HEAVILY apple taxed...

I'm seeing basically 3x+ the performance of the 5770 in mac OS and Bootcamp (win 7 x64). Plus those juicy cuda cores and make a BIG difference with things that support them. Plus the 2gigs of vram is VERY handy with the silly resolutions I prefer. And to top it all off the card has 4 outputs so 4 displays now instead of 3... the HDMI is limited to 1080p but that's all my old 21" will handle anyway so fine by me.

All that said there are some pretty big caveats to be aware of if you're following this path.
* Make sure the card you buy doesn't need more/other than 2 6 pin power rails. If it needs something else you will need adapters and/or an extra PSU to run it and things get ugly. Further I'm not sure the mac 6 pin take off on the motherboard is standard, it's smaller than the 6 pin male plug that goes into the card so you may need to track down the right wire (about $12 on amazon, but if I'm right and it's not standard then good luck finding it in your local wire shop).
* Since the card is not EFI based you will have a few critical things to be aware of. First, until the driver is loaded by the OS you get no output. This goes for mac and windows. This means you can't see the boot device menu, and you can't install windows, or update drivers on an existing windows install to make it work... It's pretty easy to work around these problems for setup and day to day usage, but in an emergency (dead drive for example) it could be a major headache. See bellow for details on getting bootcamp working.
* I would highly recommend getting a shroud style cooler. Apple did a lot of engineering to get the air flow to be crazy efficient in the pro case and they designed it with a shrouded graphics card in mind. Extra heat near your hard drives never a good thing.

Bootcamp: So there's a catch 22 with bootcamp. You can't see windows without the drivers installed and you can't install the drivers without being able to see windows (it has to be the proper nvidia drivers, generic VGA and generic NVIDIA aren't good enough). So you have to boot with both your old card (EFI so the mac can handle it and presumably you've already got bootcamp running so there you go) and the new one running at the same time. Unless you have an older or secondary graphics card that doesn't require a 6 pin rail then you'll probably be needing 3 rails and the mac only has 2... I borrowed a 3rd rail from a PC (disconnected drives so it would turn on but not do anything and then just connected the rail to one of the cards). When you can power both cards boot to windows, install nvidia drivers, and you're set. You can then shut down, uninstall your old card, move the new one if needed, and you're done.

Price/Performance with a PC card is obviously CRAZY better than an apple certified card. Since Mac OS has nvidia drivers baked in now AND NVIDIA directly supports the cards it MUCH less of a hassle than some time ago. If you really want one card to rule them all you can flash some ATI cards to support apple EFI (risky, if it doesn't work you brick the card...) or buy pre-flashed cards from a couple dealers, but that runs the cost up a little bit. Added bonus you have a PC compatible graphics card if you decide to build a standalone gaming rig...

So for anyone else crazy enough to own a mac pro and looking for some graphics oomph you can take advantage of that upgradability much MUCH more affordably these days. Highly recommended if you can handle the setup hassles and can afford to keep your old card around in case of emergency (drive/os failure is probably going to lead you to the boot device screen and that's going to require EFI)


skidracer(Posted 2012) [#2]
For games I would imagine 3 monitors would be way more useful than 2. I'm just sad my eyesight is starting to fail me just when 10 megapixel gaming becomes a reality.


ima747(Posted 2012) [#3]
Factoring in glasses runs the cost up that much more, but it's oh so worth it :0)


Corum(Posted 2012) [#4]
Thanks for your advice. I've a 2006 model (1,1) and did the max possible graphics update for that machine, purchasing the ATI 5770 from the online Apple store. I did it because of the proper additional power cable included.
Hope to come back home soon to enjoy it again.
Struggling over a late 2006 white crapbook from an year now...