Are you guys ready for some useful details and clarification? As far as GPUs and EFI, there are 2 versions of cMP. EFI32 (2006-7) and EFI64 (2008-12) This matters for 100% of Nvidia EFI cards, they can only be one or the other. The story is 100% different for AMD cards. They use something called 'EBC EFI'. (Extended Byte Code) WHICH ALLOWS THEM TO FUNCTION ON EITHER SYSTEM. Note, the EFI has nothing, NADA, ZERO, ZILCH to do with OS on a HD.
You can verify this by pulling all your HD sleds out 1/2 inch and your EFI boot screen will still show up.6870/6970 is lone exception, Netkas used 64bit iMac EFI to make this work so it is 3,1 or later only. EFI is a basic video driver for the card that interacts with the physical system before anything is loaded from HD or CD or whatever.
So, there are more facets to this. The ability to flash 5770 and 5870 was worked out by Netkas with a little help from myself some years back. AMD/Apple hard coded the display definitions into the EFI. The EFI lives a separate existence from the BIOS on a card.
So, even using a cards native PC BIOS combined with the Mac EFI results in a flawed card. Since Apple had 2 @ MDP and a DVI on 5770/5870 and no PC cards came that way, we never got boot screen on the digital ports on PC cards. (there is a way tricking EDID onto opposite channel, not worth it) So, flashed 5770 and 5870 cards only show boot screen in one place, on a DVI to VGA adapter. ONLY an analog boot screen.
AMD EFI is like that. As long as flashed card matches ports of original card, things went better. So flashed 2600, X1900, 3870, and 7950 can be basically perfect.
But 4870 lost Dual Link DVI on flashed cards on one DVI port since Apple had MDP on that port and MDP only carries a legacy Single Link DVI. The 5770 and 5870 were far more problematic since they varied so much from Apple cards. 7950/70 are based on reference cards so possible to have same 4 ports as Apple 7950.
Non-reference ones usually lose HDMI first, 2nd DVI port as well if they have one. Here is where it gets tricky. The 7950 can show a beautiful EFI boot screen on ANY Mac Pro, including a 1,1 or 2,1.
BUT.without OS mods, no 1,1 or 2,1 can run an OS that supports these cards. As a final cruel bit of kneecapping, Apple had AMD ship these with a 10.7.5 driver disk.BUT THE 32 bit DRIVERS ON THIS DISK ARE BROKEN!!!!
Any use of a 7950/70 on a 1,1 or 2,1 requires an OS mod. I have the Tiamo mod on a 2,1 here and use a 7950 with ease in 10.9.4. You swap 2 files and it acts like a standard machine, never think about it again. Nvidia EFI defines monitors differently so it is possible to 'fix' these via PC BIOS portion. But since they are all 64 bit starting with GTX285, you only get EFI bonus on 3,1 or later.
So, easier to have a card with boot screens on any and all ports, but not on a 1,1 or 2,1. As far as the use of UNFLASHED PC cards, if you Google 'ATYInit' you will see that it was a little kext written by Netkas a few years back that allowed the use of PC cards back in 10.6 (maybe earlier, I don't remember exactly). If OS X had drivers, this little kext allowed the cards to work.
All that happened recently was that both AMD and Nvidia allowed this function to be built into their drivers. They can 'self initialize' without an EFI or helper kext. And here is the part that is so poorly understood due to the Apple 'mystique' of exoticness. There were only 2 Mac GPUs for Mac Pro that ran off just an EFI. They were the X1300 and X1900XT.
(X1300 an Xserve card mostly) Apple must have found this to be a royal pain and gave up. (They had to include the PC BIOS in the main machine EFI to have it work in bootcamp) So EVERY Apple card after, from lowly 7300GT to vaunted Quadro K5000 uses an EFI to get those boot screens then hands off running the card to the PC BIOS. Each and every card has an EFI and a PC BIOS. Clock speeds, fan profile, etc are all run from PC BIOS. This is why it was so easy to have these cards start working without EFI and instead rely on PC BIOS, they WERE ANYWAY.
Drivers For Ati Radeon 68
Wow, just had my buddy point out it looked like I was writing an encyclopedia. Just hate to see urban legends/myths get propagated. I imagine I'll repost this on some other sites too, may help some people. As far as OP's question.
He has the option of any AMD card that is flashed, but should be clear with seller about what ports show boot screens versus which ones start working after driver loads. For 5770/5870 I suggest getting used Apple OEM cards unless you have a VGA display in daily use. Flashed 6870 will only have boot screen on DVI IIRC. 7950 you ma as well buy the real Sapphire card as a way of thanking them for making in first place. The real question is will anyone offer one last EFI card for Mac Pros? 10.10 carries R9 290X drivers (Hawaii) but without an EFI.no boot screens. Latest 10.10 Nvidia drivers carry GTX750 (Maxwell) drivers, but again, if no EFI is ever released, we already have the last boot screen cards.
Send some nice emails to AMD/Nvidia. BTW, last addition to 'GPU Mythbusters'.the newer cards for PC all carry 'UEFI' which is 100% useless to a Mac Pro, either version.
Ati 6990 Drivers For Mac
So our Mac EFI probably won't work in a UEFI board and a UEFI GPU will NOT work in EFI mode on a Mac Pro. The UEFI gets ignored and the PC BIOS works normally. Any questions? Kappy wrote: Have you installed a GTX 660 in your Mac Pro? If so are you able to see the startup boot screen?
I have a non-Apple 5770 in my Mac Pro and the only way to see the opening boot screen is in VGA mode. In Digital mode the screen is black until the startup is completed. The reason is the lack of an Apple boot ROM on the GPU (I'm not referring to re-programmed ROMS.) The last AMD card to work at ALL is the 5870. Nvidia, however, has native support under 10.8, so GTX 500/600 cards DO have boot screens, even though they are normal PC graphics cards. Google it, and you will find many forum posts about it.
I've never used any GTX card in my MP, so did not know because mine comes from 2006 and cannot run Mountain Lion. The GPU updates to support these Nvidia cards came in Mountain Lion. They were not available in Lion. Unless the OP has a 2008 or later MP he won't get much use from the newest cards because the slots are limited to PCIe 1.0. Even the 5770 is somewhat of overkill because the '06 and '07 models cannot take advantage of the cards full capabilities. But hardly anything else will work in them that is equal to or better than the 8800 the OP now has.
Kappy wrote: I've never used any GTX card in my MP, so did not know because mine comes from 2006 and cannot run Mountain Lion. The GPU updates to support these Nvidia cards came in Mountain Lion.
They were not available in Lion. Unless the OP has a 2008 or later MP he won't get much use from the newest cards because the slots are limited to PCIe 1.0. Even the 5770 is somewhat of overkill because the '06 and '07 models cannot take advantage of the cards full capabilities.
But hardly anything else will work in them that is equal to or better than the 8800 the OP now has. The title of the thread does say he owns a 2008 Mac Pro 😝 He should be good for the GTX cards, as his signature says he also has Mountain Lion. He would just need to buy any GTX 500/600 card and pop it in the Mac. I still reccomend getting updated drivers from Nvidia.com though. Even it it does work it would be a waste of money because your model has PCIe 1.1 slots. You couldn't begin to take advantage of all the abilities of that card. What would possibly make it worth while is if you buy a new Mac Pro with PCIe 2.x slots.
You will have the same problems with X-Plane if you select options that your computer's slots cannot support even if the GPU does unless it's just a limitation of VRAM. But 512 MBs of VRAM should not be a limit unless the game developers stipulate the game requires a higher minimum. All that having 512 MBs instead of more should cause is slower game performance.
I agree with Kappy's advice. I upgraded the graphics card in my early 2008 Mac Pro to the Mac version listed below.
It was a great decision. Aperture runs way faster. The upgrade was pretty easy. I ordered mine from B&H. It cost around $224.
One thing that threw me at first is that the product description says (Mid 2010) in parenthesis. It still works on early 2008 Mac Pros, Apple just won't certify that it will work. I've pasted the B&H product description below for reference. Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB Apple APA5770C ATI Radeon HD 5770 Graphics Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro (Mid 2010).
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