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GTX 770 GPU upgrade to 970 worth it?

chiaccio77

chiaccio77

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 25, 2016
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Hey Guys! First post here. I have an early 2008 Mac Pro running bootcamp with an EVGA GTX 770 SC (2GB) in a PCI 2.0 express slot. Would it be worth it to make the upgrade to one of the EVGA 970 FTW+ cards? Or would some other hardware in my computer make a bottleneck for the newer cards? (Specs below). I have considered getting another 770 & run SLI, but my motherboard only runs 225 watts to the PCI, so I would have to get an external power supply, so I don't know it'd be worth the hassle if my CPU's or my PCI 2.0 slots would be a bottleneck? Thanks everyone! :)

I currently run games at 1080p with high settings comfortably, I was hoping to make the jump to 1600p to match my monitor.

Specs:
Mac Pro 3,1
(2) 2.8GHz quad core Xenon
16 GB 800MHz
Samsung Evo 850 500GB
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan

SoyCapitanSoyCapitan

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chiaccio77 said:
Hey Guys! First post here. I have an early 2008 Mac Pro running bootcamp with an EVGA GTX 770 SC (2GB) in a PCI 2.0 express slot. Would it be worth it to make the upgrade to one of the EVGA 970 FTW+ cards? Or would some other hardware in my computer make a bottleneck for the newer cards? (Specs below). I have considered getting another 770 & run SLI, but my motherboard only runs 225 watts to the PCI, so I would have to get an external power supply, so I don't know it'd be worth the hassle if my CPU's or my PCI 2.0 slots would be a bottleneck? Thanks everyone! :)

I currently run games at 1080p with high settings comfortably, I was hoping to make the jump to 1600p to match my monitor.

Specs:
Mac Pro 3,1
(2) 2.8GHz quad core Xenon
16 GB 800MHz
Samsung Evo 850 500GB
Click to expand...

Mac OSX doesn't support SLI and neither does your motherboard.

The 970 is about 20% faster than the 770 in Windows but on OSX there's no significant difference unless you use the CUDA cores for compute apps.

But there's a growing problem with the Nvidia web drivers. Glitches have started to appear in graphics and video applications. The only remedy is using the built in OSX driver, but that doesn't support the 970.

And if you flash your card then it will have problems in Windows/Bootcamp because currently the Nvidia drivers for Windows are not playing nicely with flashed cards. Windowed productivty apps like Blender, Photoshop, etc are slowing to a crawl.

The big promise that was sold on this forum was that Nvidia was really looking out for cMP owners. That may have been true for a short while but it looks like the dream is over. There's no development on this front and the bugs are starting to increase.

Play safe with a card that works out of the box until further news. Polaris is the best hope unless Apple and AMD work together to shut cMP owners out.
 
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Synchro3

Synchro3

macrumors 68000
Jan 12, 2014
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SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
But there's a growing problem with the Nvidia web drivers. Glitches have started to appear in graphics and video applications. The only remedy is using the built in OSX driver, but that doesn't support the 970.

And if you flash your card then it will have problems in Windows/Bootcamp because currently the Nvidia drivers for Windows are not playing nicely with flashed cards. Windowed productivty apps like Blender, Photoshop, etc are slowing to a crawl.
Click to expand...

With which driver version (OS X and Windows) the problems started? At the moment i'm still on OS X 10.8.5.
 
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Synchro3 said:
With which driver version (OS X and Windows) the problems started? At the moment i'm still on OS X 10.8.5.
Click to expand...

On OSX it's definitely the newest web driver along with the newest El Capitan 10.11.4. The visual glitches in Photoshop are affecting 6, 7 and 9 series cards.

Reverting to the web driver fixes the problem if your card is 6-7 series. This means the issue is definitely the web driver.

But prior to that there was always a bug in the web driver that caused Photoshop to crash on certain OpenCL based operations (enlarging images for example). The only solution was to disable OpenCL.

On Windows the problems with flashed cards are also recently introduced. A flashed card will slow to a crawl in windowed productivity apps that use OpenGL or similar API. Reverting to a stock ROM fixes the issue.

So on the Mac side the web drivers have been introducing bugs, in the Windows side the drivers don't like flashed cards. It's annoying that Nvidia isn't quality checking these things but I suspect it's because they don't have a full time Mac lab anymore. Last summer they had to hire someone to implement Metal support because there was nobody available in-house to do it. It really looks like the end of the road here.
 
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