If you have been reading some of my other posts you will know that I have been experimenting with PC versions of Nvidia graphics cards in my Mac Pro. I first tried the GTX 550ti but had some issues with the Mac coming out of sleep (this issue may have been fixed in the latest drivers) I have now installed an EVGA GTX 660ti. My Mac Pro is running Mountain Lion 10.8.2, the latest Nvidia driver from and CUDA version 5.0.36. The Mac does not show a startup screen when booting into OSX but as soon as it gets to the login screen the display appears. The machine is stable under OSX and Windows 7. The speed of the graphics card is excellent and running synthetic benchmarks I get very good results, however, one of the main reasons for installing this card was to get better performance in, colour grading software from BlackMagic.

I recently came across on the creative cow forums, about the 'Standard candle' test for systems running Resolve 9. Here you can download a test Resolve project and compare performance on your machine. I have to say my experience differs somewhat. I purchased a 660 Ti for my 3,1 Mac Pro running 18GB of RAM and Mountain Lion 10.8.2. The card runs OK for a bit, but then crashes the entire machine with a total freeze and screen corruption with multiple blue diagonal staircase-like errors. I swapped it out for a Quadro 4800, and now everything's remarkably stable. I have another 3,1 on its way, and I will definitely be trying the 660 Ti in that machine when I have some time.

I'll try to report back to see if it's just my machine that doesn't like the card. And, yes, BTW, I have installed the new Nvidia Mountain Lion drivers made available last week. The latest drivers (304.00.00f20) didn't do it for me, alas. I am running Premiere Pro CS6 (6.0.2), in a CUDA accelerated sequence when it crashes. I'm running the 5.0.24 CUDA drivers - did a fresh install of those, too.

It really doesn't matter what kind of video is in the sequence - H.264, ProRes, MP4, DV50. All of them crash just the same. I'm away from the office now, but it's a Mac Pro 3,1 (quad core 2.8), 18 GB RAM, OS 10.8.2, with a Crucial M4 512GB SSD main drive in the first drive bay using an Icy Dock adapter. I have just the ATI Radeon stock card (at 256 MB RAM) and a small Newertek eSATA dual port card in slot 4. Like I said, after a week of non-stop running, I have yet to crash the machine with the Quadro 4800 installed instead of the 660 Ti.

I think I'll just leave the 4800 in this machine, and try again with the 660 Ti on the 3,1 I've purchased from eBay. On the plus side, that machine has two of the GTX 120 cards in it, so I'll steal one for this machine and use it instead of the Radeon.

I'll try to remember to report back once I've given it a whirl. Very interesting stuff. I finally got the chance to swap the cards into my second 3,1 system. After wrangling with some software licensing issues due to also trading out my system drive for the new system, I was able to launch PP CS6 and an old project that continuously caused crashing in the old system. And what do you know.

The darn thing works flawlessly! It's clearly a hardware issue with the other box, which now has a Quadro 4800 FX card running great in it.

So, Therefore, it's not nVidia drivers. It's not Premiere Pro. Heck, it's not even the OS or some corruption, since I'm using the exact same system drive! I'm happily chugging along with two systems now, roughly identical, other than the headless acceleration cards and amount of RAM installed. All that being said, the 660 Ti smokes in this computer. I've never seen Premiere Pro less bothered by stacking effects and multiple layers of video. I can only imagine that Resolve would work reasonably great as well.

Hi Neil, I'm away from the office, but I can assure you, aside from the amount of RAM, these machines are pretty much the same. Same make (3,1 - early 2008), same OS (10.8.2 with all the updates), same software (Adobe CS6 with all updates), same amount of hard drives installed (4), One has 18GB of RAM, the other has 12 GB - so that's the only significant difference. I've actually boosted the working machine to 20 GB now, and it continues to run fine. I even had them hooked up to the same monitors for testing purposes. My first machine just didn't like the newest nVidia card. Hi Neil, I just installed a GTX 560 in my Mac Pro 3,1 (10.8.2), replacing the original 8800GT.

I was able to install the CUDA driver from the Nvidia website, however I can not install the retail driver (304.00.00f20). I get a 'driver not needed message.' When I check GPU info in After Effects CS6 (I edited the CUDU support file to enable the card), it is not showing a Shader Model and the OpenGL version shows 2.1 NVIDIA-8.0.61. Any thoughts on this?

I can go into the package for the retail driver and use the installer to bypass the system check, but I didn't know if that would cause any issues. Any help would be appreciated! Best regards, -Matthew. Hi Neil, Thanks so much for the analysis of the 660 TI. I have a few questions. First off, let me apologize for my complete lack of knowledge on the subject of GPU's. Having said that, I have a mid-2010 Mac Pro 5.1 running 10.8.2 with 1 ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB.

My first question is, in your opinion will I see a significant improvement with the 660 over my current card in Adobe CS 6? Is it going to work my money, even with the current issues with CUDA? Also, when do you foresee this problem being corrected?

Second question, (and this is the one I'm really embarrassed to ask) will I need to remove the card I have in my machine now in order to install the 660? Essentially, can I run both cards at the same time? If not, will this card support 3 displays? Thanks so much in advance for your help! Please, wait to laugh at me until after I leave.:) K.L. Hello there, You should get a big improvement over your Radeon HD5770.

Up to 2.8 times faster in some benchmarks:-) Although there are some problems with CUDA at the moment I'm sure Adobe and Nvidia will sort them out. They have worked very closely together to get the Mercury Engine running. Your second question is trickier:-) The 5770 and the 660ti are both dual width cards (ie they take up two slots) so in theory they could both be installed but I wouldn't recommend it. Also there would be an issue with power connections as the GTX 660ti needs two 6 pin power cables.

The GTX660ti has connections for four monitors but I have not been able to test the Displayport or HDMI outputs. So, it should work but I haven't tested it:-) Good luck and let me know how you get on, Neil. Neil, Thank you so much for your thoughts. Also, thanks for explaining the particulars in easy-to-understand language.

That makes it so much easier to figure out what will work and what will not. Currently, my machine has 2 x 2.66 GHz 6–Core Intel Xeon processors with 16 GB of RAM. Most of my work is in high-definition video editing and some After Effects work as well. Considering my system, and what I am using it for, what would you suggest?

Should I commit to the GTX660ti or is there a better/different option you would suggest? I can't really make an investment in the Quadro 4000, but if there is a better option then the 660 four just a little bit more I am all ears.

Thanks again for your opinion it has been very helpful in my search for the most efficient upgrade. Hi Neil Thank you. I managed to test the Display port and it works perfectly! So one down and one to go, will get back asap with my results. On a side note.

I am an editor/DOP and have been working with FCP for many years, after FCPX came out, I was really dismayed as I had always hoped the software would catch up to my mac pro. (running a 2008, 8core 3.0GHz with 16GB ram and now the EVGA GTX660 ti) I hated FCPX and even though it was 64bit I stuck with FCP7 studio. I've got a fast SATA raid as well as SSD inside the Mac Pro but editing, rendering & transcoding are always so time consuming. I was thinking about switching to CS6 for a while and after placing an order for The blackmagic Cinema camera I knew I needed to sort something out pronto! Your solution is incredible! My machine is so fast now, I can layer up many streams of Prores as well as add screen overlays and it just keep up.

I've had to learn CS6 Premiere but it's not too bad and I forced myself to switch on my last paid job so there were no excuses. It's definitely bye bye to FCP. Sad times, but apple really dont care about this market any more.

The shift was when they renamed the company from Apple Computers to Apple Inc. They are an end user focused company now (iphone, ipad etc) Anyway rant over, but I just wanted to thank you for assisting me in the transition from FCP to CS6. Much appreciated.

Kind regards Ibrahim. Anonymous Hi guys i have Evga gtx 550ti for pc runing great on mac pro 4.1 osx lion 10.8.2 with latest cuda drivers 5.0.36 from nvidea for osx. When i launch resolve lite i get that screen (the fallowing unsupported card are being used for image processing nvidea gforce gtx 550ti)i have my gforce in sloot 2 and gtx 120 in sloot 1 of my motherboard and i am using gt 120 for lcd prevue.

So if this card has cuda drivers why is it that resolve lite is giving me error message? I did resolve setup on windows mac and no problems at all with this card. I have some questions if you can please answer.

Before 550ti card i was running Radeon 5770 and resolve lite would give me 2 error messages but resolve still was working should i return this card 550ti and save money for mac/resolve graphic card? 550ti and resolve work just fine my primary editing system is FCP is it possible to edit in FCP and use resolve in Windows for color or should i stay with just one platform do all my work on OSX platform. 3.In resolve windows version is the graphic card setup same as in mac. Slot 1 and 2 4. Most of my work is personal projects should i be using resolve at all since i don't have reference monitor. Hi there, I have the warning message from Resolve with my GTX660ti but the system still works. (I have had a couple of crashes but I'm not sure if they are driver or heat related, am investigating) 1.

I would personally spend a little more for the 660ti, you're getting over 1000 more CUDA cores. It's possible but I would stay in OSX 3. The windows configuration guide for Resolve doesn't mention the Mac Pro:-) but it only needs 2 x16 PCIe slots. Both slot 1 and 2 in the Mac Pro are x16 so it shoud not matter which way round the cards are. If most of your work is personal I wouldn't worry too much. Run a test project and check it looks good on your TV or projector. Otherwise you could buy a cheap colour cailbrator and calibrate your monitor.

Good luck, Neil. I just purchased a Mac Pro yesterday, its the 12core system with 12 gigs of ram and the radeon 5770. I was dissapointed to discover their lack of support for video cards especially since these machines are pupulor for editing and studio work. I'm a new Primier Pro user, never got into Final cut.

I currently have a Zotac GTX570 in my old PC machine, should I try using this on my Mac, or would it be better to shoot for the 660ti, since it seems to be a bit more on the stable side? Any word on how it runs AE? Thanks in advance Robert, I've read a few of your articles, and your reporting is impressive to say the least. Hi Edward, Nvidia did release drivers for Lion 10.7.5 You can download them here: However, these are only supposed to be for Mac Pro 3.1 and up.

If you look at the comments on my other post here: You will find information on how to install the drivers on your Mac Pro Once these are installed the GTX 660ti should work. Good luck, let me know if you succeed in getting it running. Hi Ernesto, Mountain Lion 10.8.2 has native support for Nvidia graphics cards such as the GTX 660ti. I would go for that or maybe a GTX 670. I think the GTX 680 and GTX 690 are too expensive and will draw too much power.

You will need to get two power cables for the card as the ones in the Mac Pro are different from the usual PC ones. Here is a link to cheap cables on ebay: Make sure you download the latest Nvidia drivers and CUDA drivers.

See my other posts for links. Install those before the card. You won't see a boot screen but don't panic, wait a minute and the login screen will appear. If you are using Adobe CS6 follow the instructions here to enable CUDA acceleration: Good luck and let me know how it goes, Neil. Hi Neil, First of all, thank you for all the info you provide and the kindness with which you offer advice. It's a real breath of fresh air.

I'm thinking of upgrading the graphics card in my Mac Pro 3.1 with a GTX660 (as opposed to the 660 ti model) which only uses one power cord. This would allow me to also power the 8800GT I have now. The question is: If I keep the 8800GT in there, would I be able to utilize it's EFI to maintain the Apple boot screen, but still get the performance enhancements on my main monitor with the GTX660?

I love to have my cake and eat it too, and I'm hoping this is a situation where I can. Thanks, Andrew. Hi Neil, I use my Mac Pro to run Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya and the occasional game.

This machine is mostly for light freelance work when I'm on hiatus from my regular job. The primary reason I was contemplating the 660 vs the 660 ti was the US$70 savings, not the single power cable requirement, and since this computer isn't my bread and butter, it seemed prudent to keep costs down somewhat, while still getting a major performance upgrade. The Apple boot screen is not a make or break feature for me. I suspect the desire to hang onto it is partially sentimental, frankly. I DO prefer to keep the Mac acting as much like a Mac as possible, and I use the boot screen fairly often, as it saves some time over booting the computer and then immediately rebooting.

I suspect I'd get over the loss of the boot screen but if I can easily keep it, it would be lovely. Thanks again for your help and guidance. It's very much appreciated. All the best, Andrew.

Hi Neil, I hear what you're saying re: the CUDA cores. I'll have to decide what to do in that regard. Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals are certainly a possibility to explore.

Do you think that there would be a danger to the hardware if I end up with a 660 and plugged in both cards at once? The two cards together are about 50 watts less than the 300 watt PCI limit, and there are no other PCI devices in my machine. I'd test it out if the only major worry was that I'd have a freeze or a crash, but if you thought that the overload might burn out one or both of the cards, the power supply, or the logic board, I'd steer clear of that experiment all together.

One more thing, while I'm thinking about it. Do the CUDA cores come into play with CS6 only, or will they play a major role in CS5 as well? I need to research how much Maya uses them, too. Thanks a lot, Andrew. Hi Neil how is it going? First of all I want to thank you for having a great blog where lost mac users can get help from profesionals like yourself.

Ive been searching all over the internet and forums and I am a little confused about graphic cards,maybe you could help me. I have a mac pro 3.1 with snow leopard install,and want to upgrade my graphic card,my old 8800gt is getting old and need a new upgrade. I work 90% with 3d software (cinema4d and Vray lighting) and my machine is really stable with snow leopard,what graphic card you would recomen me for those applications. Thank you for any responde,I am a bit confused at this moment. Hi Neil I run an EVGA GTX660ti in my 2009 MacPro 4,1 with Mountain Lion 10.8.2 for a few months now.

I have disable sleep mode because I had some issues where the Mac was not coming back from sleep mode. But there is a bigger issue that bothers me for the moment. My system is always crashing when working in After Effects CS6. Sometimes after 10 minutes, sometimes after 3 hours.

I don't see any pattern (yet) what causes the system to crash. I just see the beachball turning and there is no way to shut down AE or even the Mac itself.

The only thing that helps is holding down the power button and restart the system. I read about a similar behaviour on a forum where a user is having issues with a Nvidia Quadra 4000 (which should be officially supported by Adobe on the Mac). So i think it's not a problem of the Nvidia card. Have you every used AE CS6 on your mac? I also had a Blackmagic Intensity Pro installed which I removed a couple of hours ago. But since then, I had 2 more crashes.

Asus Gtx 660 Drivers For Mac Pro

Now I have disconnected the HDMI cable where I had a 3rd monitor attached. I will do some further testing.

Can you tell me, what CUDA and NVIDIA driver versions you have currently installed on your system? Cheers, Pascal. Hi Neil, Thanks for your insightful blog.

I just bought a GTX 660 Ti, after thinking my GeForce 8800 GT was toasted. I've had a bit of a chicken vs.

Egg dilemma - couldn't use the card if I didn't have Mountain Lion, but couldn't see anything on my machine to actually install ML. Because the new card needed ML. So I pulled the drive out, installed it in a drive carrier via my MBP laptop, then put the drive back into the tower after installing the latest Nvidia / CUDA drivers.

With only one power cable, I just saw a black screen, so I thought, maybe I needed to bake my old 8800 GT some more! 45 minutes later, with the solder reflowed and cooled, I put the heat sink back on, and it worked like a charm. So now, I want to power both cards, but only have 2 Molex connector cables, even though there are 3 ports. How did you go about supplying power to the GTX and another card assuming you are using one card for display, and the other GPU card to accelerate Resolve? Are you powering the old card with a single cable, an the other with a dual, like this?

I'm in the midst of soldering a dual cable together now, but. I thought I'd ask first. So I just bought a GTX660 (NOT the Ti) because it was on sale and because I'm on a budget.

Anyway the 660 comes with one 6 pin PCIe input port and the cable that it ships with is a y cable that splits to two 4 pin molex connectors (for the PC). I bought (ordered) the regular 6 pin PCIe to 6 pin MINI PCIe cable from moddiy and I'm not sure if this will work now that I look at it. Link to cable- http://www.moddiy.com/products/Apple-Mini%252dPCIe-to-PCIe-6-Pin-Video-Card-Power-Cable.html#.UNXB5nBCUb0. Correct cable. Installed cudadriver-5.0.37-macos, Retail-304.00.05f02-macosx. Moved the original GT120 to slot 2 and installed the GTX660 in slot 1. Problem was that the connector cable I purchased was about 4 inches too short.

A trip to RadioShack and splicing all 6 wires with an extra 6' remedied the situation and plugged everything in, closed the case and booted up. Setting up CUDA cores, Mercury engine in AE CS6 and then running some benchmark tests using LuxMark v2 and geekbench. (I can already see the speed difference - especially in Photoshop) System profiler lists the new Nvidia card perfectly.

Hi Neil, I'm currently attempting to help out my buddies wife with her old 2007 Mac Pro 1.1. I'm a PC guy but after doing the research it really isn't hard work out the difference accept apparently with video cards. Her current OS is 10.4 but I have purchased 8 gigs of RAM and the 10.6 and 10.7 OS upgrades and now I just need to know what card I can tell them to buy.

I don't want to stick them with some PC card that won't do them any good. Everything I have seen about upgrading to GTX cards has been for 2008 models and up.

Anonymous Neil, thanks for all of your work on this. I just received my GTX 660Ti card but am still waiting for the power cables to come. System Info OSX 10.8.2 8-core MacPro4,1, Early 2009 16 gb RAM CUDA Driver 5.0.37 GPU Driver Version: 1.3.4.0 (304.00.05f02) I inserted an old GTX 440 card I had (which does not require external power connectors) in Slot 0 and moved my GT120 display card to Slot 1.

I had never been able to make work on Snow Leopard. When I boot the system, it brings up the white Apple screen for awhile then I get a kernel panic and a black screen that tells me that the system has a problem and cannot boot. If I recycle, it does the same thing. I have been reading information about kext files that the Hackintosh community have modified and I am wondering if I need to do anything with these files. I have struggled with this problem for about six months and I now assume I will have the same problem with the 660Ti card. Anonymous Neil, I wanted to provide an update on my journey to get the GTX 660 Ti card working in my system. Someone on the Apple forum identified the problem.

While attempting to get my GT440 card working on Snow Leopard last year, I had installed a kext called Natit. This was the reason that my system was reporting that I had a GT440 card installed when I really had the GT120. After removing Natit.kext from my /System/Library/Extensions directory and rebooting, System Profiler reported the GT120 card. I was then able to install my 3 gb GTX 660 Ti card in slot 1 and use it as the only Graphics device. I modified the /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenCL.framework/Versions/A/OpenCL file as instructed by Netkas to open up to support the 3gb of memory.

I have already added the GTX 660 Ti card to the cudasupportedcards.txt to make Premiere Pro work. That said, I still cannot get Premiere to locate the GPU. I performed the same steps on a colleague's system and we were able to get it working. Thus I must have done something else to the system that I must track down and undo, but I am indeed making progress.

Thanks again for your help. Thanks for all the info. But I got to say i am a bit stuck, so i got the card but it does not work I tried both the.36. 37 cuda drivers along with the card drivers, without luck the card is not visible to any of the Adobe Apps. I see it in the system prefs and under yhe system info for the hardware when so my question to you is do you think it could have anything to do that I got the Super clocked version?

Which one do you have? Again thank you for your time. Here is a link to the card I got. Timothy Weidelman so I installed the Nvidia 660ti last week into my MacPro 3.1 and im getting a hand full of issues. 1st: Computer wont wake up from sleep. 2nd: C4D R13 freezes when i apply textures sometimes.

3rd: AE CS6 won't allow Cuda GPU acceleration even after i followed the steps here: Im currently using OSX 10.8.2 AE 11.0.2.11 GPU Driver Version: 1.3.4.0 (304.00.05f02) CUDA Driver Version: 5.0.37 is there something i'm missing to make this smoother, and acceptable in AE6? Anonymous Thanks for this article. I couldn't tell from here, but can you tell me if a 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 running Snow Leopard and bootcamp Win 7 x64 (where I do most of my 3D work with CUDA apps and video editing with Premiere Pro CS6) work with a 660 Ti. No one seems to mention if they are using Bootcamp. I need to be able to switch between Win 7 x64 and OSX (I can upgrade that partition to Mountain Lion if needed) for the apps I use, but I still want a better card than the Nvidia 8800 GT. I was considering a new Quadro K5000 for mac, but it seems very expensive and I can't find if it is actually shipping anywhere.

So my next best option for best Mercury Acceleration along with fast 3D and CUDA is the 660 ti. Is there a guide that would help me use such a PC card in a Mac Pro that uses Win 7 bootcamp too? Will I be able to hold the option key down and switch from win to osx when booting if I use one of these cards? If not what is my best option if I absolutely need bootcamp and high performance 3D & video on this 8 core machine? Hello Albert, Sorry I have only just seen your post.

You don't need Windows installed for the card to work. If you have Mountain Lion installed the Mac should see the card and use it. You can install the Quadro drivers from Nvidia but they shouldn't be necessary. The CUDA drivers should be installed. The GTX660ti does need two auxiliary power cables, are you sure they are OK? If you are getting no response at all I would suspect the power cables or the card is not seated properly in the slot.

Which slot are you using? Thank you again.

I do run 10.8.2. On a Mac Pro 3.1 with Cuda drivers: 5.0.37 GPU Drivers:1.3.4.0(304.00.05f02) that I downloaded from Nvidia.com and installed after installing the card. The card sits on slot #1. Powered by too original cables.

I even powered it via an external power supply Neil. I do see and use the card with or without any drivers but not to its full potencial because the the GPU is not visible to any of the Adobe Apps. So I cannot use the adobe mercury playback Engine. I Installed windows 7 Via Parallels and no luck. I am testing W7 in Bootcamp. The problem is I can't point it to reboot to M.Lion the only drive visible is W7 so I have to pull the card out and use my trusty ATI card to be able to see the boot selection window.

Can u explain where do a pick how to reboot to OSX while in Windows. Perhaps I am doing it wrong.

Thank you for your time. What a breath of fresh air and hope your site brings to me.

I have been researching for days my head hurts and I am getting more confuse everyday. I thank God that brought me to this site and hopefully you can help me make an informed decision since I only have a day to do it now. Here is were I am. I have a 2008 Mac pro 3.1 running Snow Leopard will upgrade to 10.8 latest version in the next few days,120 SSD, will also upgrade to OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240 GB SSD 2.5' 16GB of Ram and have 2 graphic cards, a GT120 and a GTX285 manly for running Davinci Resolve. Now I plan to use my computer not for gaming, I do this professionally and this my only computer and this is were I make my money. I will be running most of the time After effects CS6, Davinci Resolve, Final Cut pro, premier Pro, Smoke 2013, Maya and C4D working with HD video.

I was already set on a Quadro 4000 because that is what all the pros were suggesting as a powerful and reliable card, but after calling Blackmagic support to find out if the Quadro was a supported card the support guy dropped a bomb on me that has driving me to go crazy, He said that they are running the GTX680 on their machine and that I should consider that. Man oh Man I have been researching since then and there is a lot of mix feelings out there but no concrete and absolute answer for me. Please help me. I love the Quadro because since this is my only machine and were I make my money reliability since my computer runs sometimes for days non stop is a must but also if I can gain speed and power I will be very happy. So I dont know what to do.

Will the GTX cause me problems becuase is not design for pro app? How much of a difference there is realy in bettewen both cards? Can I combine the GTX 680 with th GT120?

How will that affect the perfomance? As a profeesional what would you do? Thanks a bunch neil God bless.

Thank you Thank you so much for your fast response. I guess that is what I will do. Buy a GTX680 set it up and work like a normally do pushing my system to the max all the time, and If I am not satisfied them move to the Quadro.

Great advice, that will give me the peace of mind that I need to move forward. Any suggestion to were to buy acard that I can return? I believe EVGA will be a better choice right? And can I combine the GT120 with GTX680 for even better performance? I've seem a link for the power cables you have on previous reply will that still work for the GTX680? Thank you so much for your help.

I will refer you to all of my friends in need also. Hope you don't mind me sharing a link to your site on my pages(FB twitter etc.) Regards. Hi Neil, hope you can help me. GTX 660 Ti installed today.

Running Geekbench and Cinebench 11.5. Miserable performance after all: Cinebench (before upgrade to GTX 660 Ti) OpenGL 31.11 BpS Cinebench (after upgrade to GTX 660 Ti) OpenGL 26.71 BpS Is it possible? Did I do anything wrong with the installment of the card?

As you wrote above, I installed the newest nVidia drivers and the CUDA Driver for MAC. Result: Cinebench OpenGL 26.91 BpS. Does anyone have an idea? That would be great! Cheers, Daniel.

Hey Neil, Thanks I will save your email. I forgot to ask you in my case that I plan to use the card with Maya and C4D and AE should I go with the 4GB or the 2GB GTX680? I also want to share with you some test I found to test AE and your card in real situation, I imagine that you have seen it but just in case the guys at creative cow here is the link:My current system MacPro 2208 3,1 120GB SSD with 16gb ram dual card GT120 and GTX 285 did it in 28 min, almost the same as the Quadro 4000 example that there is on that forum post. Its a lot compare to what other system are doing some in about 1min and some change.

I will be curious to know what your result is. I have order my new OWC mercury pro 6G 240GB SSD and Mountain Lion. I will start my upgrade tomorrow.

As always thank you for your help cant say thank you enough. May God continue to bless you with wisdom.

My friend as always Thanks you thank you so much. Regards Fernando. Hey Neil Thanks again.

That is what I will do. Sorry to ask you this lol what you mean by same basis?LOL I just don't know and want to make sure I follow your advice well. Here is my update so far since you been helping me. Got my new OWC Mercury pro 6G SSD, its installed, bought and installed Mountain lion. Installed all the updated Cuda and nvidia drivers from your above link.

My system is running smooth. Did a geekbench ad I benchmark 10180+- and I am a little better then when I was running Snow leopard. Will now install all my apps and run test on all of them one by one before I erase my first ssd and use it as a media drive. Hopefully that will give me a better performance even before upgrade to new GTX680 4GB.

Is there a change you can share with me the files from the candle light test for resolve because the yousend link is no longer active. I would like to compare my test to yours, and a brief explanation how to run the test so I can be accurate.

As always I would like to say thank you for you help. I know you are a busy man, but you still take time to help others, and I don't know how to thank you enough. Please let me now how I can be of any assistance to you here in Florida, It will be a pleasure. Best to you my friend.

Hi Fernando, I just meant buy the 4GB version from somewhere that will let you return it if it doesn't work.:-) You can find the Standard candle test files here: You will get a timeline with one shot with various grades on it which are labelled like the results you see on the thread. You can switch from one grade to another and then test your playback speed. Are you running the full verson of Resolve or the lite version?

The lite version will only support one GPU. You can send me some of that Florida sunshine:-) All the best, Neil. Hey Neil, I remove my 2 previous comments because I was having problems opening the file in Resolve and could not find the image file for the test,and I had some questions but after some research and the help of our friend Google LOL I found the video file to use with the test. With your permission I would like to offer to host a link with those files for easy access to some friends here in your blog or I can send the file to you. I am running Resolve 9.1.1 Lite so far, coming from color, so testing but really hoping to make the complete switch soon and never look back. My plan is to get the BM Camera and the full software in the near future. Here is my test results for the Candle Light Resolve.

My system: 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 2x 2.8 Quad-Core, Runnig 10.8.2 and lastest Cuda and Nvidia drivers from your link above. 16GBram 240GB SSD OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G and a second SSD 120GB 1TB Disk and 750 Disk. GT120 GUI runnig 27' Mac display and 20' Mac display and GTX285 GPU no Display attached. V00 2Nodes 23FPS V01 4Nodes 23FPS v02 8Nodes 14FPS v03 16Nodes 8FPS V04 32Nodes 4FPS V05 64Nodes 2FPS I send you an email. Thank you again so much my friend I am very happy now that I have your guidance I can look into the future and plan ahead. I will be sending you some Florida sunshine soon.

My main concern was not being able to boot into safe mode if necessary, but I've discovered there are a pair of terminal commands, one that makes the os boot into safe mode and the other that returns it to normal boot mode. Sudo nvram boot-args='-x' sudo nvram boot-args=' Of course you can't do this if you can't boot up in the first place. So I may hold on to my 4870 for that kind of situation. I checked out ebay and see used GT120's for about $100. Not too bad really. Thanks again! Anonymous Thanks, Neil.

I've ordered a couple items to improve performance of Cs 6 on my Mac pro 4,1 2x2.66 quad 12 gb ram ATI radeon 4870 512 mb. 1 - the gtx 660 ti and 2 Mini pcie 6 pin to pcie 6 pin cables. 2 - 2 x 8 gb of 1066mhz ddr3 ecc (thermal) RAM.

I'll be following instructions closely on installing drivers, card n cable, as my tech ability is limited. 3 - upgraded to mountain lion I'm considering installing a solid state drive to dedicate to the cache and maybe the OS but not sure if it's worth the money, I've seen internal SSDs sell for about a dollar per GB. Do you have experience with a similar upgrade? Thanks again. Anonymous Hi Neil, I've installed the GTX 660 ti and premiere has enabled GPU acceleration. Your instructions made it easy. Premiere is now in beast mode.

I don't find the EVGA model to be as loud as some reports might suggest, at least it's not louder than my ATI radeon hd 4870. Huge thank you and high five. I repeated the process for AE copying name of GPU into the file 'raytracer supported cards.txt' Any other advice so that AE and other apps can leverage the new GPU? I read on another blog that AE would only activate GPU acceleration for the ray traced renderer. Bit of a downer cause performance speed in AE was my main reason for upgrading my GPU. Hopefully installing an internal SSD and boosting my RAM will speed it up. Hi Neil, So I've got the 660ti up and running.

Thank you again for all your help. I also installed the latest Cuda driver from NVIDIA. Two more questions for you: their site doesn't seem to have drivers on it for Mac. I noticed some folks here talking about updating to the most recent drivers. How does one go about that? Or is it even necessary?

Finally, is OpenCL enabled on this card? Is it something we can enable? Is it worth the trouble? I'm a video editor and I use just about every editing, media, and graphics application you can think of. Thanks in advance.

Hi Neil, I put my old card in and it boots fine. I also found some information on how to uninstall and revert nvidia driver to the Mac version, which is to run the 'NVIDIA Driver Resore.mpkg' file under application support/NVIDIA. I've done that but I'm hesitant to try to put back the 660 ti until I know if this worked. I can't figure out how to know what version of NVIDIA driver I have on the system now (or if it would be a different number than the one I tried to install). There's plenty of info on how to find out this info for a Windows machine. Any thoughts on this? Could the problem have been that I installed the new driver without uninstalling the CUDA driver first?

Is there an order this is supposed to take place in? Are we sure the 05F02 is the right one?

The reason I tried to install it instead of letting the mac driver alone is that I noticed some issues on video playback, where parts of the screen were slower to refresh than others, causing lines across the screen. I didn't have that issue with my 4770. Thanks in advance for the help. I just went through it again to make sure I didn't mess up the driver installation the first time, or install the wrong one or something and the same things happened all the way around. I'm posting again to suggest that perhaps it's the MSI implementation that is the problem, since all other factors are the same as the folks here have had no issues with. I'm going to exchange my MSI for the EVGA and see if it occurs with the new card.

I really don't want a card that can't have its drivers updated. If it doesn't work then there must be some kind of system issue unique to my situation. Perhaps I installed the wrong driver at some point in the process and then the right one, but something got messed up along the way.? Hey Neill, Hope all is well. My friend I am in desperate need of your help again and hope I am not abusing of your willingness to help those in need. Since I found your site it has been my following guide, so every time I can't figure something on my own after days of research I came to you, hope you don't mind. Here is were I am.

Have finally put the money together for the GTX680 4GB. I was ready to buy the EVGA. Well the guys at Blackmagic advice me not put any 6pin-8pin or 8pin-8pin power configuration card.

Unfortunate after researching and calling EVGA I found out that EVGA does not produce any dual 6pin configuration for their Geforce gTX680 4GB, left with no choice I start researching what other company also produced the Nvidia Geforce GTX680 and out of all of them only 4 has the dual 6pin configuration available on their GTX680 4GB. ASUS, MSI, PNY and ZOTAC. Of the four I came down to ASUS and MSI due to their colling abilities since I run my system for long periods of time. I have search the internet for a MSI N680GTX Twin Frozr 4GD5/OC and its almost impossible to find one, Amazon has one but at $1700, that is crazy, Newegg has it listed but it says discontinued, Can't find one WHY?

Are they that good?(I will call MSI today to find out more)now the ASUS is available from Amazon and Newegg. Now my friend here is were I need your help.

Witch one of this card do you recommend and why? I would love to buy a card today and get over with it LOL, after so much research man I am hurt,LOL Please help me understand one more time, so that I can carefully take the next step. Neil thank you in advance for everything. I send you the email with the link as promised, hope you recived. Hi Neil I just wanted to say thank you for all you info and maybe you could help me with a small problem I'm having with my EVGA GTX 660 Ti. I have a 10.8.2 MacPro5,1 with 32gigs memory a 512gb solid state drive. My cure driver is: CUDA Driver Version: 5.0.37 and my GPU driver is: GPU Driver Version: 1.3.4.0 (304.00.05f02) and I'm running 3 monitors from it (2dvi, 1hdmi) so all up to date.

The problem is my card keeps hanging my machine. And its totally Random. But what i have noticed is it tends to happen while swapping programs or going into my browser (safari). I had the over clocked card and that kept hanging the machine so swoped it for the standard 66ti. The thing is the Machine does not crash the display just hangs.

If music or a video is playing in the background you can still hear it and the mouse cursor works but the monitors are frozen. Any Suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much for your time. Hi Niel, many thanks to share your experience here! I use a similar computer than yours (Macpro 3.1, 2x2,8Ghz Quad, 22Go 800Mhz ram, GTX660TI 2Gb, Decklink HD with latest Desktop Video 9.7, Cuda driver V5.0.36, GPU driver V1.3.4.0 (304.00.05f02). Only one monitor. But using Resolve 9.1.1 lite with my new 660TI don't give any improvement in playing h264 clips (Canon 5D 1920x1080 25fps) or rendering to ProresHQ.

I still have the slow 11fps to 15fps max that I had with my old geforce 8800 for Mac. It's not a hard drive speed question. The clips play well with any other software. Graphic card appears in OSX and Resolve recognized hardware lists. Same warning message than you when I open Resolve. Any idea or suggestion would be welcome!! Thanks again Rom.

Hi Neil, Boy this thread never ends, huh? A testament to how much help you've provided to people through it.:) I'm following up with a report and a question or two. I went ahead and got a GT120 and the EVGA 660 ti, to mirror your setup and all seems well. I've installed the latest CUDA driver for 10.8.3. I'm leaving the Nvidia driver in the Mac OS alone because of issues I had trying to update it with the MSI card I tried previously. If it's working, why change it?

I also enabled the mercury playback engine in Premiere following the instructions from your blog post on the issue. Worked like a charm, thank you. Let me ask a question I have about that first. I noticed in the post that you said it was optional to make your card OpenCL compatible as well. But I think your post was graphics card agnostic. Is this something I could or should do for the graphic cards setup that you and I share? So I've re-read this thread and noticed a couple of things you've said that I'd love it if you could clarify for me: 'I found Resolve worked better with a GT120 for the UI and the GTX660ti purely for CUDA.'

Does this mean I should connect my monitors just to the GT120? Or is there some other kind of setup change that I need to do in Resolve or elsewhere to use the 660 ti 'purely for CUDA'? I've also seen you suggest to some that they should go to Preferences/Debug and add these lines, then reload Resolve. LsManager.3.NumGPUs = 1 LsManager.3.GPUMapping = 0 LsManager.3.GPUMappingEnable = 1 Is this something all of us who want to use Resolve with the 660 Ti should do? Or only those with a particular problem?

Also, I thought I remembered you mention a way to activate all the cores of the card for use by Resolve, or is my memory playing tricks on me? I didn't see it in my read through. And finally, do you have any other final suggestions? I'm hoping I'm reaching the end of the journey. Thanks again for everything Neil.

Hi Chris, Thanks for updating me on your progress, I never realised how much interest this post was going to generate.:-) Your questions in order: Enabling OpenCL should improve processing on Non-CUDA based cards, but also possibly in After Effects with CUDA cards. Anyway it can't hurt to enable it. Regarding GPU's and Resolve, If you go to Preferences system overview in Resolve it will tell you which card it is using for the GPU. If you have the GTX660ti connected to a monitor it may default to the other card. The LsManager lines seem to be switches to tell Resolve to use any CUDA capable graphics card, I got those from the forum on the Blackmagic website. You could give them a try and take them out again if it doesn't help. I think that covers it:-) Let me know how you get on, Cheers, Neil.

London, United Kingdom I started out as a Video Tape Editor in the 1980’s and was one of the first editors to embrace non-linear editing at the beginning of the 90’s I then went on to work for Lightworks and was instrumental in the development of their Heavyworks and Newsworks systems, sharing in the Technical Emmy that was awarded to the Heavyworks system. After Lightworks I moved to Discreet logic (now part of Autodesk) where I was the European product specialist for Smoke and Fire. I am an accredited Smoke trainer and an Independent Certified Expert for Sony.

I am available for Smoke training so if you are interested drop me a line at Neilr@btinternet.com I also write occasional articles for Redsharknews.com.

I played it safe. I bought an EVGA modular power supply and jumpered the pins so that it thought power was on. I connected two video power cables to the PSU and snaked them into the case though an empty PCI slot opening. Running a Gigabyte GTX 980 Gaming card.

Room for another on the PSU and in the Mac Pro 5,1. I keep the PSU switched on. I have the Mac set to NOT update MacOS, nor to reboot after power failure. I religiously shutdown Mac and then hit switch on power strip that handles Mac and EVGA PSU.

To start up i reverse the process. This way there is always power available for the card(s). Web driver work in Sierra.

Card also works great in Windows 10 under Bootcamp. A tip: I bought a MacPro 5,1 with GTX980 (and GT120) from you in March.

Since then I have performed several updates, some of which result in a black screen because Apple have tinkered with the drivers. To get round this, as well as switching off and swapping the GPU for the GT120, another way is to use the “Share Screen” function from another networked Mac. This displays the log-in screen, and allows you to access, download and update the Nvidia drivers without having to dig the MacPro out of the rack. It works for me Guy. First of all, thank you so much for your positive declaration that a Mac Pro 2009 5.1 is good to go for installing the macOS Sierra system.

Like many people I have invested time and money upgrading my System only to be informed that Apple was about to consign my proud `new` machine to the knackers yard!!! Your news has given me so much confidence, that I have purchased a GTX 1080 Founders Edition card. If and when dear old Nvidia creates the Mac drivers for this speedster it will certainly be the icing on the cake for me. What started out as a very modest early 2009 Mac Pro has almost closed the gap on the shiny Trash Can Pro performance! Have a mac pro 5.1 running OSX 10.12.1 Installed a new gtx 980 ti using the latest drivers cuda 8.0.53 and quadro geoforce 158f03. Graphics work great in either DP or HDMI connection, but I get absolutely no audio.

The monitor is no longer listed as an audio output device, and in system/hardware/audio: there is no listing anywhere for either HDMI or Display port as an audio source. So the bottom line is that i get great 4K video, but no sound.

Any ideas how to remedy this? Here is one crazy thing i noticed, I replace the original ATI HD 5770 to get my sound back, but left the Nvidia drivers on the mac. Those drivers are running the HD5770 at 4K with no issues and sound!!! How is that possible for a non 4K rated video card to run 4k with another mfg driver? That question is just for curiosity, what i really want to fix is the sound on the GTX 980ti. All help and suggestions will be greatly appreciated. I’m wondering if you can help me remedy some behavior we’ve been experiencing at the studio with a similar setup.

Every so often while using video card heavy workflows (editing 6k video, rendering composite vfx) we’ll experience what we’ve been calling BSOD, or, the “black screen of death”. Basically, everything just locks up for one second, then the screens go black. The machine becomes totally unresponsive, and requires a reboot. You can’t screen share.

No sleep-mode wake up. We first tried addressing the issue by having our GTX 980’s flashed with the correct firmware through a service provided by MacVidCards.com.

This gave us our Apple logo back on startup, but did not seem to improve the regularity of BSOD occurrences. We were then lead to believe that perhaps it was a power supply issue, where heavy tasks we’re basically cooking the motherboard and causing the machine to seize up. So we purchased external power supplies to run as dedicated power to the card. It seems to have helped reduce the amount of BSOD occurrences slightly, but not completely eliminating them.

We’re currently on the latest release of Adobe software using the 2017 versions of Premiere and After Effects heavily. Any help/insight would be much appreciated! Here’s our setup: Model: Mac Pro (Mid 2012) OS: 10.11.5 Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 (4096M MB) Processor: 2 x 2.66GHz 6-core Intel Xeon Ram: 128GB DDR3 Power Supply: Corsair CX Series CX750M We have the latest NVIDIA and CUDA Updates installed. Hi there, I’ve a question regarding a tower I got from you guys last year. Currently 1x 980ti (6gb) fitted in there, but I’d liked to add another 980ti or a 1070. My question is, do you think it would be better to fit the new card in the 2x slots I have free, and change the PSU, or will the cards be too close together and potentially overheat?

So the second option would be to put the new card in an external chassis, and link to PCIe, with it’s own power. Which if either do you think is the better option? Thanks a lot, Alex. Hello, I followed your guide to install my NVIDIA GTX 980 on my Mac Pro 5.1 (late 2012) about a year ago, maybe less.

I had everything working great, even audio over HDMI with a few kexts I found. Whenever I had an OS update I’ve always been able to swap the native card back in, install driver updates, and good to go again. But I updated to 10.12.2, and now I get a black screen on startup, as if the display simply doesn’t recognize the GPU. I swapped back in the AMD card and confirmed my NVIDIA web driver and CUDA drivers were both up to date, but it’s still not working. By the way thanks for the guide and thanks in advance for the help!

I installed and ran a GTX 960 on my MacPro Tower for the last 10 months. Then today I installed a software update and these Nvidia drivers are no longer compatible with my computer. I cannot reinstall the drivers either. It gives me an error message “Mac OS X version is not compatible”. I reached out to Nvidia chat support and they simply told me the GTX 960 is not supported by Nvidia running on a Mac. Buyer beware, this is not a stable solution for better graphics performance!

I hope at some point soon a new software update from Nvidia or Apple will make using my card possible again.