life8meuptoo Posted July 14, 2011 Share Posted July 14, 2011 8800 GTX and Quadros for mac pro 1.1 Hi, Just joined the forum looking for an answer to my graphics card problem. I currently have from PCs: 5x 8800 gtx 1x Quadro 4600 1x Quadro 4500. What I want to do is get all of these cards working in 5 of my gen 1.1 mac pros under 10.6.8. I need the cards to be functional for 3D animation and video compositing. I have read through the forums and bricked a couple of 8800 gtx cards and still have not had a lot of success. I'm hoping you folks out there can help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3.14r2 Posted July 15, 2011 Share Posted July 15, 2011 Don't know about Quadros, but 8800GTX should work for sure. Use ATY_init.kext, it should enable the above card. Quadro might probably be enabled with the same kext. More on that kext check on netkas' website. However it will not be the same as a native Mac card. It should be used side by side with a Mac card (of any type), cos' there will be nothing shown on the screen (no signal is produced by the card, so no grey screen and Apple logo) till OS X is loaded. This is because there is no EFI part present in non-Mac vga cards' ROM (the above part is needed in order for the card to be used during start-up process). What ATY_init.kext does it just injects needed data, therefore the card is recognised and initialised, but only when OS X is already loaded. There are MacVid 8800GTX cards (some other card too) for sale. So as you can see it can perfectly work on Mac. What they did is added needed EFI part to PC card ROM, and there it is, a "genuine" Mac card. If you could get the ROM file from the above 8800GTX card and flash it to other 8800GTX cards you have, you could probably end up having 5 MacVid cards working OOTB on all your Macs (just don't forget to share the ROM with us, if you get it ). To sum up, there usually are two ways to use a non-Mac card on Mac: Use ATY_init (or other similar kext) Create EFI enhanced ROM for the card (or use ROM from Mac version of a PC card) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
life8meuptoo Posted July 15, 2011 Author Share Posted July 15, 2011 Thanks, that ATY kext is one I haven't used. I'll give it shot tonight and let you know how it goes. If I find the ROMs, I'll post them here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
life8meuptoo Posted July 16, 2011 Author Share Posted July 16, 2011 I just did some research about the ATY_init.kext. I'm not sure how this is going to help my NVIDIA cards. Would you mine elaborating? thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3.14r2 Posted July 16, 2011 Share Posted July 16, 2011 I just did some research about the ATY_init.kext. I'm not sure how this is going to help my NVIDIA cards. Would you mine elaborating? thanks ATY_init is working not only with ATI/AMD cards, but with Nvidia cards too. You just need to use a helper Nvidia card (any PCI vga card for Mac (Mac version - not PC version)).https://discussions.apple.com/thread/267094...&tstart=330 http://netkas.org/?p=117 You will also need a power connectror/adapter as 8800GTX has two external power connectors. It will not work without these connected. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforc...wer,2122-8.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigeasy Posted August 27, 2011 Share Posted August 27, 2011 Try http://themacelite.wikispaces.com/ they are all about modding pc graphics cards to work in macs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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