Upgrading a Mac GPU?

[nothingspecial]

Got a G5 Mac Pro that is grinding along, and on observation it does have a PCI Express slot.

Question is, will any old card work in there, or (as I assume) will it need Mac specific drivers? If so, does anyone know of a card/vendor that might have them?

Very much uriniating in the wind with this one, as I've never really worked with Apple stuff before.

[hmmblah]

You need a MAC specific card and they are expensive. On the Apple store, a 5770 is like $250. I'm sure you can find cheaper at a reseller though. Also, make sure the card is compatible with your MAC.

[FTLN]

Originally Posted by nothingspecial

Got a G5 Mac Pro that is grinding along, and on observation it does have a PCI Express slot.Question is, will any old card work in there, or (as I assume) will it need Mac specific drivers? If so, does anyone know of a card/vendor that might have them?Very much uriniating in the wind with this one, as I've never really worked with Apple stuff before.

Originally Posted by hmmblah

You need a MAC specific card and they are expensive. On the Apple store, a 5770 is like $250. I'm sure you can find cheaper at a reseller though. Also, make sure the card is compatible with your MAC.

You just need a efi compatible bios for your gpu (be carefull mac bios's can be larger than the eprom on cards designe for windows) - Visit Netkas.org for more info... G5 Is old architecture so Driver mods may only be targeting x86 nowadays...

My GTX 560 from Msi with a few modded drivers runns much faster in an opencl enviroment in Lion than it does in windows...

Here is 560 booted into Lion 10.3.3



And in Win 7 X64

[equk]

Originally Posted by nothingspecial

Got a G5 Mac Pro that is grinding along, and on observation it does have a PCI Express slot.

Question is, will any old card work in there, or (as I assume) will it need Mac specific drivers? If so, does anyone know of a card/vendor that might have them?

Very much uriniating in the wind with this one, as I've never really worked with Apple stuff before.

Originally Posted by FTLN

You just need a efi compatible bios for your gpu (be carefull mac bios's can be larger than the eprom on cards designe for windows) - Visit Netkas.org for more info... G5 Is old architecture so Driver mods may only be targeting x86 nowadays...

My GTX 560 from Msi with a few modded drivers runns much faster in an opencl enviroment in Lion than it does in windows...

As it's a G5:

it won't be based on EFI

the expansion slot will require a mac specific card as it makes use of extended firmware (bootup vga functions/registers)

it will not support lion** (the latest version it will support is leopard 10.5.8)

** a lot of new retail 5xxx + 6xxx cards work out of box on lion as the device id's exist in the new ati drivers

Apple official site: Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) and Mac Pro: Graphics card compatibility between models

Although the Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) and Mac Pro models both use PCI-E (PCI Express) based graphics cards, the cards are not necessarily interchangeable between models. Learn which cards work with each generation of computers.

Depends on what model you have etc

I think the best thing to do is get some advice from a mac store if there's one close or ping them an email as there are a few models.

[Rastalovich]

Annoying isn't it.

I've got a bunch of ppc G5s, some decent enough processing power to use 10.5.8, but the best gfxcard I got is a 6600.

Yes, Ouch!

Would be nice if even a PCI graphic card could go in there. You can't tell me with all the hackintoshing going on that by some mysterious linux related fete, someone couldn't mush something together.

Even if it's to keep the 6600 in there to boot, and opt to the *whatever* PCI card after. Not necessarily a new driver, just something to recognize it and use and old driver - just using the acceleration of the newer generation.

Bah!

1 tip for ya'll though, and it took me a while to figure out why they start off great with leopard, then trudge down, - turn off pdf indexing in Spotlight. Infact turn a load of things off in Spotlight. It attempts to run whilst you're doing stuff, indexing for search reasons, and makes your fans go crazy(er).