ATI RADEON HD 4870 Mac

Interesting idea. I will give it a try. At this point, I looking to buy the Snow Leopard upgrade and hopefully solve this problem by simply replacing the OS.

I just replaced the OS and upgraded to 10.6.3 without success

That is discouraging. Did you do a clean install of OS 10.6? I am going to try to install 10.6 on a separate drive, erased, and partitioned as a GUID start up disk. Then, I am going to try to migrate the old OS 10.5.8 to this new start up disk. Hopefully, the problem will not migrate too. If it doesn't, I am hoping to "Time Machine" the new OS back onto the original drive that I will have erased and partitioned as a GUID start up drive. Convoluted as this is, I can't think of any other method of restoring the Quartz Extreme acceleration to my video cards.

Make sure the cable is fully inserted into the mini-display port. When I was plugging in my second monitor I stopped pushing the cable in as soon as I encountered some resistance and it turned out I had not fully inserted the cable.

Thank you ! it was exactly my problem 🙂

Installing Snow Leopard has solved the Quartz Extreme problem but now Photoshop CS5 only sees the Nvidia 7300GT located in slot 4. How can I get CS5 to recognize the ATI HD4870. On an Adobe thread, someone says I need to put the ATI in Slot 4. This doesn't sound correct. Another says that Photoshop will not recognize more than one card, therefore I need to remove the 7300GT and run both monitors off the HD4870. Seems like a waste of a video card.

Any one know the facts?

On an Adobe thread, someone says I need to put the ATI in Slot 4. This doesn't sound correct.

It won't fit in slot 4, and even if it did, you shouldn't put it there. Slots 3 and 4 don't provide as much power or cooling as slots 1 an 2, so Apple says high power cards should use only slots 1 or 2.

Another says that Photoshop will not recognize more than one card, therefore I need to remove the 7300GT and run both monitors off the HD4870. Seems like a waste of a video card.

If you don't have more than two displays, get rid of the 7300GT. Two displays work better on one card.

Thanks Malcolm. I was hoping to save the 512GBs of vram for Photoshop CS5 by using the 7300GT as my second monitor's card. I guess a bad idea. Now I need an adapter to get the second monitor attached to the HD4870.

This question / post is so off from the OPs it deserves its own thread, if you have a question or problem, and want answers / replies.

Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 don't have two dual-wide slots; the ATI 4870 is such of course as you know from having installed it - and even though Apple product page said "2008 or later" and won't just come out with a more accurate "Works in ALL Mac Pro models" it does work fine.

When someone says something, be sure to take into account if it is the same Mac and other factors. So often I read "someone said" and it is just... best to close one's ears I suppose. Or grain of salt. Or you find a diamond in the rough.

Someone did some tests and found that CS4 definitely benefits from 1GB or more graphic memory.

The 7300GT isn't much of a graphic card, not only only having 10GB of bandwidth and 256MB memory. Just that you can't use a nice say GT240 $100 that has 1GB and 56GB. Or one of the newest with 1.2-2GB VRAM.

Adobe and Nvidia showed off a $1700 Quadro CX, a card with 2-4GB and designed solely to offload (GPGPU and CUDA and someday OpenCL) rendering. Windows only, but then you can run Windows quite nicely on Mac Pro and have access to use more powerful and other options in graphics.

OS X isn't really good though at "off-loading" or using PhysX type technology. Or SLI or CrossFire.

Hatter -Thanks for the opinions. All help is appreciated. FYI, I did start another thread but there were no responses. This one seems to get the attention I was hoping for.

Thread hijacking is counter productive, and I don't see anyplace that you created a thread yourself. Go to the top of a specific sub-forum where you can.

Apple never allows reflashing firmware, whether EFI, SMC or graphic card, unless it failed and you created a restore CD for firmware first.

There was a firmware 'fix' for 7300GT for Windows compatibility, otherwise there hasn't been anything since Aug/Sept '07.

I agree. But I was in no way trying to hijack a thread, only looking for answers to the problems I am experiencing trying to update to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 and have it work with Photoshop CS5. Seems relevant. But maybe not.

I also had a black screen after installing the 4870. I tried flashing it through the Mac instructions on this site , http://boeglin.org/blog/index.php?entry=entry090918-031702> but that didn't seem to work but it did disable one of my 7300 card's video ports.

I think I'll try upgrading to 10.6 and if that doesn't work I'll try flashing it on a PC

Replying to myself because I found the problem really wasn't the card but the fact that my Viewsonic monitor can't read the DVI connection.

So if you get a black screen with the card it may actually be the monitor not the card.

When our Mac Pro 1,1 came out 4 yrs ago, there were reports, surprised me as a frequent ViewSonic owner, of some models not working.

And in 2009 there were quite a few issues with "3rd party" and common (Dell etc) models not working on anything other than a DVI port.

The 5xxx cards ought to be MDP 2.0 and hopefully have few if any issues now that ATI is using it more.

I just think thoughts and ideas can get lost and buried in a thread where someone is asking a question that might go in different area, deserves its own (and so you can keep it open and if needed get help).

Glad you resolved it though.