Again, great links, lots of good info, thanks. I spent about 10 hours yesterday and the day before reading through them.
No, I didn't know Lion began support of NVidia PC cards, but I do now 🙂 Thanks for the heads up.
What I have learned in a nut shell (A lot of this is repetitive of the info found in the FAQ link provided above, and simplified a little, let me know if I got anything wrong):
• IMHO as of 10.05.2012, it seems the nVidia GTX 570 is THE best option for our Mac Pro Machines especially for things like video editing (Thanks for the recommendation). More info...
• The GTX 5xx and 6xx cards work great on 10.8.2, and NVidia just released another driver update for 10.8.2. (This overrides the current Mac Dirvers and seems to increase performance but may cause a monitor sleep issue)
• GTX 570 (or one from the 500 series) may be the best choice because the drivers are more mature than the 600 series (This may no longer be an issue with the drivers released several days ago, the verdict is not quite in), and the 580 and 480 models (+ others?) require an external power supply. I personally don't need that headache.
• All of these cards need supplemental power in the form of 2, 6-pin cables (internal Power Supply, not external, which is normal) sometimes you can use ones from the Video card you are upgrading, but they are also available on Amazon for $11.65 per cable, search "PCIe Power Cable For Mac G5 nVidia ATI") I'm not are if they come with new cards or not.
• EFI does not work with PC cards so you will not get the white apple boot screen unless you buy a modded card (But still works fine, the screen is just black until it boots to the desktop and loads drivers, then it comes on fine). Also you won't see the PCI card in the system profiler (Again, unless you buy an EFI modded card, more on that below…)
• nVidia CUDA works out of the box for these cards in Mountain lion 10.8.2 to accelerate applications like After Effects, Premiere, Da Vinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro. For earlier OSX releases you may need to perform some code surgery, you can dig through the links above if you do)
• OpenCL - There is an issue reported of cards over 2 Gig in memory having OpenCL disabled, you can fix this to take advantage of OpenCL (It is turned off by default in OSX) you have to download and use a "fixed" Netkas nVidia driver kext mod (Google the link, methinks it not wise to postith it here 😉 ) Do this after updating to the latest version of ML 10.8.x, and have installed the most recent available nVidia video driver.
• To take advantage of Open CL for some Adobe software (like Photoshop plug-ins) you may have to mod an ASCII text file adding the card to the list, as these are not tested by Adobe for the mac (Google it).
• The 6xx series cards are capable of PCIe 3.0, and the 5xx series are capable of PCIe 2.0, but both run in 2.0 mode in OSX 10.8.2 with the latest nVidia Driver… However under Lion 10.7.X, the cards operate in 1.0 mode (2.5 GT/s) not 2.0 mode (5.0 GT/s), which may cause a slight performance hit (Not 100% confirmed) unless you buy a modded one, like this one from MacVidCards which runs in full 2.0 mode:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-GTX-570-for-Apple-Mac-Pro-2-5-GB-CUDA-DaVinci-Res olve-Adobe-Premiere-570-/330790764997?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item4d04aa81c5
If you got his route you want to buy the "DVI + Display-port" version if you have Apples awesome LED Cinema display, not the dual DVI. Also, the card may need some kind of adapter if you are buying a non-modded version - Mini DV to DVI to work with Apple Cinema displays ($8). With the modded version he includes an adapter and internal power booster cables needed. The cards are about $200 more than just the Out-of-the-box GTX 570, so make sure these extra features are worth the extra $ to you. I believe the out of the box cards now work in 2.0 mode in ML 10.8.2 natively, you just won't get the boot screen.
• The 5xx series is better for things like Adobe after Effects and Premier because it has better CUDA and OpenCL capabilities, where the 6xx cards are better for Gaming.
• It has been reported the GTX 570 runs fairly cool and is acceptably quiet for a card of this power.
• GTX 5xx power consumption is a bit more that the 6xx series.
• Card should be placed in slot 2 not slot 1
• You don't have to install a driver for 10.8.x because Apple released ML with nVidia drivers that work with these cards, however there in a new driver from nVidia that should perform better in some respects.
• People are reporting that it renders RED camera footage in realtime with layers of FX in nodes for programs like Da Vinci Resolve, and that Adobe AE and Premiere CS6 render in real time, no dropped frames.
• These cards aren't perfect, but run great for an unsupported card. The only issues I have read of at this point are that some people's monitors are not going to sleep, but a fix for this is most likely on the horizon.
Continuing down the rabbit hole...
