Can I put the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 into my Mid-2010 Mac Pro Desktop?

Unless you run the card in Windows you must have a flashed version of this card specifically for Mac specifically from a vendor that retails mac flashed cards, not an OEM from anyone or anywhere else, not newegg, not tiger direct, not CDW, not even Nvidia. Those cards won't work if you do.

And the drivers will need to come from the retailer, not Apple or Nvidia.

web search Mac Flashed Nvidia 1080

Google says that it works in BootCamp but not OSX since there are no OSX drivers.

http://barefeats.com/gtx1080.html

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/938809/geforce-apple-gpus/gtx-1080-in-2 012-mac-pro/

apparently no flashed 10xx cards for mac at this time but you can still get 9x and Titans flashed for Mac Pro's so they will run in OS X

I am not aware of anyone who can Mac Flash a 1080 card.

Yes, a Mac Flashed card will work both in OSX (show boot screen too) as well as BootCamp/Windows

Why do you want to use the 1080?

This

shows benchmarks in BootCamp/Windows

http://barefeats.com/gtx1080.html

not to my knowledge, if the correct GPU drivers from the vendor are installed by Windows you are running "windows" hardware, not a Mac running Windows in OS X, if you virtualize you will defiantly see slowness in the GPU, but cold boot to Windows, you are in Windows. If in doubt ask the vendor of the card, but keep in mind the 1080 is the first gen of the 10 series and expect major changes in the next iteration, price drops as they expand the distribution and better performance.

dissonance8 wrote:

Hmm okay, thanks for the info. I will do more research about this flash thing.

By the way, my friend said that running bootcamp with bottleneck the CPU and severely limit the potential of a GPU like the new cards like GTX 1080 or 980, etc, and I will get only a fraction of the power of the GPU's potential, even if I'm on Windows OS, albeit via bootcamp. Is this true?

Your friend is (mostly) wrong.

If you are running Windows via Boot Camp you are running Windows natively just like on a real PC. It will therefore be as fast as a real PC. In fact on many occasions people have found it faster than a fresh out of the box real PC because it will not be stuffed full of 'bloatware'.

The issues that would these days make a classic Mac Pro running Windows via Boot Camp slower than a new real PC are the fact that the Mac Pro is of course old - the last classic Mac Pro dates from 2012, and hence it will have slower CPU chips, slower RAM, and a slower PCIe slot. The classic Mac Pro 2010 and 2012 have PCIe 2.0 slots with 16 lanes. The new PCs would now have PCIe 3.0. This however does not make as big a difference as you might think.

Your friend may be getting confused with the possibility to run Windows via in a virtual machine on a Mac using either VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. These in the later versions do provide some video acceleration to the copy of Windows in the VM but no-where near as fast as running Windows directly. However as I said Boot Camp means you are running Windows directly (natively) so this does not apply.

Since Windows does support a GTX 1080 card you could fit such a card in a classic Mac Pro, use Boot Camp to run Windows 10, and it will work. You will not see anything on screen until Windows has finished booting, this is where having a video card 'flashed' to include Mac compatible firmware is needed. However this does not prevent it booting, it merely means you do not see anything until booting has finished and the driver has been loaded.

Note: The GTX 1080 does not yet have any Mac drivers, the current best card with Mac drivers is the GTX 980Ti. MacVidCards can 'flash' the 980 and 980Ti to include Mac firmware, the drivers are standard (Mac) drivers direct from Nvidia.

John, FWIW you can get a Titan X with 12GB RAM flashed for Mac from 3rd party distributors.

JimmyCMPIT wrote:

John, FWIW you can get a Titan X with 12GB RAM flashed for Mac from 3rd party distributors.

I believe the Titan X is older than the 980Ti. While the Titan X still has more RAM I wondered if it may no longer be the speed champ.

Macvidcards says the Titan is still the most powerful:

http://www.macvidcards.com/store/p44/Nvidia_GTX_Titan_X_12_GB_%282014%29.

includes "The most powerful card currently available for Mac."

The Titan is an absolute beast and has some advantages to the 980, but it will actually go to-to-toe or beat out anything in the Quadra lineup in many applications that are not optimized to use the Quadra.

The 10xx's are still to new for me and I'm waiting to see what the 2nd generation pull out of their hat. I'm not a fan of first generation devices, too many things tend to go "back to the drawing board", currently the 10xx's are rated higher for almost all things you can do with the Titan but the Titan is the only card with 12GB right now, it's also 3x the price of the 980. It's possible though the 10xx will eventually come with 24GB or 32GB RAM.

No it is not, Bootcamp is not emulation. You have full access to the hardware when you boot into bootcamp. The Mac Pro 2010/2012 is a PCIE 2.0 machine so your card will be bottlenecked (but real world losses are likely to be in single digits).

There is a new Titan based on the 1000 series. It is $1200. So to answer your question, yes the Titan is the fastest, but not the Titan you are thinking of.

AFAIK a good 3.0 card in a 2.0 connecter the bandwidth loss is very minor and unnoticeable in some circumstances, but if someone wants to send me a pair of Titan X's I'll be happy to try it out and be sure.