1st Gen Mac Pro vs. ATI 4870

Thats because your mac pro does not have the EFI64 implementation built in. Only 2008 and 2009 Mac Pros will successfully make use of 64-bit.

I just noticed that for those who have ROM version "113-B7710C-176" the card appears to be working...I have "113-B7710F-176". Could this be the problem with the 24" LCD ACD not being recognized on my 2006 Mac Pro? I have Snow Leopard so I am not sure if that would impact this or not...if I need "113-B7710C-176" where would I find it and how would I load it?

Could you elaborate further?

My understanding is that the machine is perfactly capable of running 64 bit applications, what has the EFI got to do with it?

applications will run faster; more graphic card choice; so booting in 64-bit kernel can have an impact.

No-where does it state that a 64bit EFI is required for OpenCL to function correctly...I guess no one really knows what the problem is....likely a driver issue?

Steve Hodson wrote:
No-where does it state that a 64bit EFI is required for OpenCL to function correctly...I guess no one really knows what the problem is....likely a driver issue?

My research indicates there are no drivers for these cards; everything is built into the OS.
You can look for ATI drivers, too, let us know if you find anything. I did not.

bogiesan

Functioning and getting different bandwidth and performance are different in my world. There of course drivers. There always are and will be. How Nvidia handles 64-bit drivers and kernel mode is to be seen.

But Snow Leopard booted into the 64-bit kernel shows a consistent performance advantage over Leopard, and even more advantage over 32-bit Snow Leopard as well.

Uncheck the “Open in 32 Bit Mode” option. Testing shows that doing so is highly beneficial, even on Mac OS X Leopard.

http://macperformanceguide.com/SnowLeopard-Performance.html

http://www.barefeats.com/opencl.html

The hatter wrote:
FThere of course drivers. There always are and will be.

Maybe, but they're not available to regular people nor are they apparently needed. There are no drivers for the ATI 3870 and 4870 cards besides what comes on the Mac OS10.5 and 10.6 disks.

This is from the AMD ATI site:

*Where Can I find MAC OS X drivers?*
*Last Updated: 6/25/2009*
*Article Number: GPU-19*
*AMD Radeon™ graphics drivers are included as part of the Apple Mac OS X installation. Please update or restore your Mac OS X installation to ensure you have the latest available drivers*

However, over on
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/may09/050209.html
there is a now-inactive thread about some of those EFI thingies and hacked drivers for the ATI cards, pre-10.5.6.

bogiesan

You really should start a new thread for your issue.

Make sure you've fully inserted the cable into the card. When I plugged my Mini-Display Port to DVI adapter into my card I failed to fully insert it.

How you install the drivers is different, and they are 'bundled' into Mac OS and Mac OS updates and combo updates, except the few or once in a while like 2008's "Graphics Update 1.0" that came out between 10.5.2 and 10.5.3. 10.5.3 rolled those drivers (40MB or so) into the OS patch.

I and others sort of hoped that there would be stand-alone drivers, while others thought it would break the Mac tradition and the pretending that we aren't like Windows with separate drivers. (But Windows you can use various versions, and are not stuck or forced to use only one specific one.)

Drivers are needed. They reside in /System/Library/Extensions as extension drivers.

Sonnet, SoftRAID, Highpoint and others use package installers to install their drivers.

Don't confuse an installer and how and where - I'm sure with Pacifist you can extract and RE-install just the drivers you need. And some people have actually had luck with doing so and install an older driver when there were bugs in support with new ones. FireWire, USB, Audio and more.