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eicca

Suspended
Original poster
Oct 23, 2014
1,773
3,598
I'm not that knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, but is there any chance that nVidia's open-source drivers will allow us to put their cards into Mac Pros (even the old ones)?

Educate me.
 

DrEGPU

macrumors regular
Apr 17, 2020
191
80
I’m also not that knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, but I thought drivers were controlled by Apple now. That’s why the 6950XT isn’t/wasn’t supported when it first came out.

You could potentially lower security settings and load kexts (ie drivers) yourself, perhaps?
 

GrumpyCoder

macrumors 68020
Nov 15, 2016
2,072
2,650
Don’t get your hopes up. You’d need to sign this and the code is missing most of the display related functionality and what’s there is broken. This code is meant to better integrate scientific data flow (deep learning) in Linux and is meant to run headless.
 

DrEGPU

macrumors regular
Apr 17, 2020
191
80
Don’t get your hopes up. You’d need to sign this and the code is missing most of the display related functionality and what’s there is broken. This code is meant to better integrate scientific data flow (deep learning) in Linux and is meant to run headless.
*sees username, must ask*

What about porting the noveau driver over to MacOS. No acceleration, but it could at least drive the display and not let nvidia GPU’s confuse the hell out of the OS.
 

GrumpyCoder

macrumors 68020
Nov 15, 2016
2,072
2,650
*sees username, must ask*

What about porting the noveau driver over to MacOS. No acceleration, but it could at least drive the display and not let nvidia GPU’s confuse the hell out of the OS.
I don't think there's anything preventing a port of Nouveau to macOS, except the lack of documentation on Apple's side. So it probably would require some reverse engineering or someone leaking info. At least on the "older" Intel based systems. With M-series, I'm not so sure, but we don't have M-series with PCIe slots anyway. So in the end, it would need a team of very skilled people (not just for the Nvidia side, but also Apple) and some time (actually a long time) to end up with "slow drivers". Worth it? I don't know, I think more of a learning / proof-of-concept scenario.
 
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