Native Nvidia drivers in OSX vs Apple Default OSX Drivers

09-20-2015, 02:31 PM **#11**

Could you kindly show where it is indicated that iMacs and MBP are supported? Because the very drivers you linked in an earlier post indicates:

"MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS for Driver Release 343.01.01f01

Model identifier should be MacPro3,1 (2008), MacPro4,1 (2009), MacPro5,1 (2010) or later
Mac OS X v10.10.0 (14A389)"

"SUPPORTED PRODUCTS:

GeForce 600 Series:
GeForce GTX 680

GeForce 200 Series:
GeForce GTX 285

GeForce 100 Series:
GeForce GT 120

GeForce 8 Series:
GeForce 8800 GT

Quadro Series:
Quadro K5000 for Mac, Quadro 4000 for Mac

Quadro FX Series:
Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 5600"

None of these cards are supported by MacBook Pros or iMacs. Because they are desktop/workstation cards and more importantly, can't fit inside MacBook Pros or iMacs.

To be sure, I have attempted to search for drivers for my iMac's GTX 780m, and only found Windows and Linux drivers.

I believe you may have mistaken MBP and iMac support for CUDA drivers.

The description of the driver you posted earlier indicates it is mainly for the added support of GPU computing and scientific imaging such as enabling ECC or utilizing multiple GPUs for computing. It makes no mention of supporting more recent versions of OpenGL beyond that of which Yosemite supports. Thus, this driver is of no use to gaming nor will it offer any improved performance, features or stability for gaming.

**KHg8m3r** · 09-20-2015, 05:02 PM **#12**

I bought a Gt740 off the shelf, and it works with those.

Nintonito · 09-21-2015, 12:58 AM **#13**

(09-20-2015, 02:31 PM)Jija Yanin Wrote: Could you kindly show where it is indicated that iMacs and MBP are supported? Because the very drivers you linked in an earlier post indicates:

"MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS for Driver Release 343.01.01f01

Model identifier should be MacPro3,1 (2008), MacPro4,1 (2009), MacPro5,1 (2010) or later
Mac OS X v10.10.0 (14A389)"

"SUPPORTED PRODUCTS:

GeForce 600 Series:
GeForce GTX 680

GeForce 200 Series:
GeForce GTX 285

GeForce 100 Series:
GeForce GT 120

GeForce 8 Series:
GeForce 8800 GT

Quadro Series:
Quadro K5000 for Mac, Quadro 4000 for Mac

Quadro FX Series:
Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 5600"

None of these cards are supported by MacBook Pros or iMacs. Because they are desktop/workstation cards and more importantly, can't fit inside MacBook Pros or iMacs.

To be sure, I have attempted to search for drivers for my iMac's GTX 780m, and only found Windows and Linux drivers.

I believe you may have mistaken MBP and iMac support for CUDA drivers.

The description of the driver you posted earlier indicates it is mainly for the added support of GPU computing and scientific imaging such as enabling ECC or utilizing multiple GPUs for computing. It makes no mention of supporting more recent versions of OpenGL beyond that of which Yosemite supports. Thus, this driver is of no use to gaming nor will it offer any improved performance, features or stability for gaming.

This driver is of huge use to gaming. It's an nvidia driver, it's not the same as the apple driver. It's most likely massively faster than the Apple drivers which would bring huge performance gains. And yes MBP is supported I use those drivers on my Mac just fine. Just because it's not explicitly listed doesn't mean it won't work. Nvidia is known for ommiting supported products from driver compatibility lists. Having extra OpenGL features isn't the only way to improve performance. The drivers are a seperate stack therefore it stands that nvidia's better performance would stand in a variety of use cases.

RaverX3X · 09-22-2015, 01:20 PM **#14**

http://www.tonymacx86.com/el-capitan-desktop-support/168764-nvidia-releases-alternate-graphics-drivers-os-x-10-11-beta-346-03-01-a.html

Has the link to the actual drivers for El capitan (beta) also how to get them to work for people with hackintoshes.

Nintonito · 10-09-2015, 08:50 AM **#15**

I've been testing the nvidia drivers for the last few days and I have seen very little improvement. There are no additional extensions, and no game specific profiles are provided on Mac so games run the same. Dolphin is also unaffected, but I am running a 4980HQ so it's very possible I'm not CPU bottlenecked as the GPU is a lowly 750m. At higher IR no difference was observed

pinchy · 10-09-2015, 01:12 PM **#16**

Unless it supports opengl 4.4 extensions there will be no improvement in speed for dolphin. nvidia osx drivers native and web downloads have been stuck at opengl 4.1 for awhile now and it seems like these new drivers havent changed that.

**degasus** · (This post was last modified: 10-09-2015, 09:39 PM by degasus.)

(10-09-2015, 08:50 AM)Nintonito Wrote: There are no additional extensions,

To be honest, then it's not a native nvidia OpenGL driver. I'm also very doubtful that Apple allow such a driver.
Is this "native driver" cuda only?

Nintonito · 10-10-2015, 01:17 AM **#18**

(10-09-2015, 09:39 PM)degasus Wrote:
(10-09-2015, 08:50 AM)Nintonito Wrote: There are no additional extensions,
To be honest, then it's not a native nvidia OpenGL driver. I'm also very doubtful that Apple allow such a driver.
Is this "native driver" cuda only?

No there's a seperate "CUDA only driver". This driver has expanded nvidia GPU support and is supposedly based off the r349 branch. Dolphin identifies the revision and difference correctly so it's definitely a seperate driver package.