Graphics cards compatibility

With the new Pascal Nvidia drivers the 1060 will work. However with that said it will not have the boot screen. So if you need the boot screen keep your old video card around. Otherwise I installed it this afternoon (well just the regular 1060) and have no issues. Load the drivers before.

Here are instructions for the 980 which is the same, just search for the updated driver link.

http://create.pro/blog/how-to-install-a-standard-pc-nvidia-gtx-gpu-in-a-mac-pro- using-an-unflashed-gtx-titan-x-980-ti-98…

Originally the answer to the question is the GTX 1060 compatible with a 2008 Mac Pro running Apple's OS X would have been a definite no.

This month i.e. April 2017 - nearly a year after the original question, the answer is now maybe.

Nvidia have this month released beta versions of new drivers for the GTX 10x0 range of cards included the GTX 1060. Previously neither Apple nor Nvidia provided drivers for this generation of card i.e. the 'Pascal' generation. Apple still do not provide drivers themselves but as mentioned Nvidia do now have beta version drivers.

There is however still an issue, currently Nvidia's beta drivers are only for macOS Sierra. Since officially a 2008 and a 2009 model Mac Pro is not able to run Sierra that would still mean the answer is no. A 2010 or 2012 Mac Pro can officially run Sierra. Unofficially the 2009 Mac Pro can be easily made to run Sierra and unofficially it might be possible to get the 2008 to run Sierra.

At this point we have no idea if Nvidia will release a finished version of these new drivers which also supports El Capitan which your 2008 Mac Pro can officially run.

No recent Nvidia cards have come as standard with Mac firmware which means as standard they will not show anything on the Mac screen until the Mac has finished booting and therefore loaded the Nvidia drivers. A reseller called MacVidCards has been taking PC i.e. standard Nvidia cards and converting them to have a Mac compatible firmware which does then mean you will see the boot process on the Mac and be therefore also able to use options like the RecoveryHD partition, FileVault encryption and the option key to see the boot drive selector screen. As of today MacVidCards have not finished doing the same process for GTX 10x0 series cards but now there are beta Mac drivers they have started working on this.

Hello John. I have recently got myself early 2008 Mac Pro and I'm starting a project to upgrade it for my needs. I started with SSD, memory upgrade and El Capitan but now I'm interested if I can get proper 4k graphics that can run with good settings under 150w power consumption. I do believe 1050ti could do just this but as of now is there any news about 10X0 support on El Capitan?

As far as I can tell the driver needed for supporting the GTX 10x0 range requires a minimum of 10.12.4 i.e. Sierra. I personally do not expect Nvidia to add support for these newer cards for El Capitan.

Your other route would be the built-in Apple drivers. Here the answer would be a definite no in that Apple will not add support to older versions of macOS. Indeed they will also not be adding RX Vega 64 support to Sierra.

The Nvidia GTX-980 can do both 5K and 4K resolutions and only needs the two standard 6-pin connectors of a Mac Pro. I believe the maximum wattage it might use is 165w that's more than made up from the two 6-pin connections and the PCIe slot itself each of which provides 75w. I believe the GTX-980 can be used with El Capitan and Nvidia drivers.

This page lists 4K capable video cards - http://www.macvidcards.com/store/c13/4K_GPUs.html

Even the discontinued GTX-680 can do 4K but is a less power efficient design and obviously delivers less performance than a more modern card.

Very good question, cdecde12. My best answer is: it depends. Usually Apple has graphics card drivers built into the OS, so it *may* work or *may not*. They haven't exactly published a list of which ones do and don't work for sure. Maybe in Bootcamp or VMware Fusion or Parallels it might work, but that's if you're setting up a virtual machine.

Out of the box---no, probablly not. I haven't heard of a Mac compatible GTX 1060/1070/1080 yet. One may come along in the future. Usually what you'd have to do is get the card flashed with a Mac compatible ROM, which requires a PC and a whole lot of knowledge, none of which I have, or you could send it to MacVidCards.com and see if they'll flash it

which probably will cost you some money. Also, check out xlr8yourmac.com for reports of compatible graphics cards

as reported by Mac users. Darn shame, too. I have a Radeon Sapphire 7950 video card which works fine, but it has 3 gigs of video ram on board and that's it. The R9 series have been reported to work okay, but I can't verify that one way or the other. If that card does *sorta* work out of the box (no guarantees), you probably won't see anything on the screen until the graphics drivers load, so should you run into problems on startup, you're basically out of luck, unless you can live with that

hope that helps a bit

John B

Likely but you may have to waiy for Sierra

http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-1070.192399/

'

Googling listed:

"Babeltech http://www.babeltechreviews.com/evga-gtx-1060-sc-vs-founders-edition .... pick up a 1080GTX and it works awesome in my Mac Pro.