Flybye Posted August 25, 2014 Share Posted August 25, 2014 Hi all,I'm seeing a few contradicting things, and I would like to make sure of something.On Nvidia's site:http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-macosx-256.02.25f01-driver.htmlThe compatibility list only goes up to the GTX285, but the general consensus seems to be any Nvidia 400 series card will work with no trouble using this driver. Is that correct?Also, do all 400 series cards use the Fermi chips, or are there any specific ones I need to look out for?Thx! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted August 25, 2014 Share Posted August 25, 2014 The drivers are universal and will work with most cards. Usually the closer to nvidia reference design, the better. Stay away from cards (Zotac!) with funky output configurations that deviate from the normal (at the time) 2x DVI + 1x HDMI. All 4xx cards were Fermi architecture except for the GTX 405: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_400_series When you select "Snow Leopard", the list only goes up to GTX285 because (besides the Quadro 4000 which also happens to be Fermi architecture) that was the top of the line nvidia card with a Mac compatible ROM that was available at the time. AFAIK the next consumer grade card that came out in a dedicated Mac version was the GTX 680. Obviously those are not supported by 10.6.8 nvidia web drivers because they came out much later. On OS X, Fermi architecture cards suffer from the "Fermi Freeze" issue which was never solved. Most Fermi architecture cards require you to run something in the background that keeps the GPU occupied at all times. Lots of experimentation went on at the time, but the only thing that worked 100% was a small app that constantly drew triangles that you could set as login item, or you could have Quicktime or VLC loop a short video clip. I used the triangle drawing app on my GTX 460. AFAIR CPU usage was close to none and it was tuned so that load on the card was minimal. It wasn't very elegant, but completely eliminated the freezes. Search the forum for more information. Note that you will not be able to boot Snow Leopard at all if you don't install the 10.6.8 web drivers before installing the Fermi card. If you don't, the default OS X nvidia drivers will detect "an Nvidia card", attempt to load and cause a hard lockup during the boot process. I don't remember if safe mode worked...I want to say that it didn't. The same thing happens on a real Mac when installing a Quadro 4000 card - as you can see on the driver download page they also instruct Mac users to install the drivers first. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flybye Posted August 25, 2014 Author Share Posted August 25, 2014 Perfect thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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