Recently Apple announced the new Macbook Pro Retina touting several new features. However what they failed to release was a long over due update to the MacPro line. Many professional editors were sadly disappointed by the “refresh” of the MacPros. This left many of our edit suites aging and unable to keep up with software demands such as the recent Adobe CS6. To make matter worse , I had my old Nividia Quadro 4000 recently fail, which left me with out a Cuda for CS6. Enter the EVGA GTX570 Nivida GeForce card.
Yes this card is a PC not designed or officially supported by Apple. (Warning I am not responsible for any damages caused if you attempt this on your on MacPro towers. ) However thanks to a great colleague form twitter Juan Salvo I did not have to spend a huge chunk of cash on another Quadro 4000. I could spend less than half that price on a PC graphics card known as the Nividia GTX570, and to my amazement, installing it is a simple plug and play. Now, will this work for your MacPro tower really depends on which verion you have. From what I understand this card will only work on MacPro 3.1 and above.
The GTX570 snaps in like it was meant to be there. All that is required is the right cable to power the graphics card. A 6pin to to mini 6pin cable is needed. You will need 2 of these cables, although they can be easily found on Amazon or Ebay for cheap.
Now in terms of software you must be running OSX 10.7.4, the latest Nividia graphic drivers (the one I used was 270.00.00f06) and the latest Nividia Cuda Drivers (4.2.10). The combination of the 2 provide support with OSX. the interesting part is that both OSX and Nivida are supporting this card “ unofficially” , this may hint to a refreshed MacPro in the future, or Nividia is moving to one driver to rule them all scenario. Once installed everything should run smooth except with minor hiccup. Unless you have another card for your displays, you will lose EFI. What does that mean? Well you will no longer see the spinning circle upon boot up. It will wither go straight to your desktop or login screen. To me this is not a deal breaker as the cost alone is worth it. Plus I also have another older ATi card I can use for display.
Now that everything is installed the finally process is to modify the Adobe CS6’s supported GPU accelerated graphic cards and adding the GTX570 to the list. This requires the use of Terminal. Now this is quiet easy to do, but if you are not comfortable with working with Terminal. Then Stop! It is very easy to cause other damage to your software / MacPro if you don’t know what you are doing in Terminal. Again I am not responsible for any damages caused by following this method.
There are many tutorials on the web on how to accomplish editing the Adobe CS6 supported cards. However, I find this video does the best job from Mike Gentilini, Jr does a great job.
How To Enable GPU Cuda in Adobe CS6 for Mac from Mike Gentilini, Jr. on Vimeo.
Adding the GTX570 not only sped up my Adobe Premier Pro , and After Effects, but it made my MacPro feel all new and shinny again. I have been working with this card for the past few weeks and I have been very satisfied with it. If you are looking to update your tower to support CS6 and all it’s Cuda accelerated glory, then this may be the ticket for you.
Tej Babra is a film maker and editor working with broadcast giants like Bell Media, CTV, Rogers, MTV, and Much Music, as well as a variety of film production companies. Tej is also a proud associate member of the Canadian Cinema Editors.
Great article! I’ll replace my MacPro 4.1 vga as well.. can I use any model of the gtx 570, or one in particular? What drivers are needed? Thank you
Thank You Luke! Sorry abut the late reply. I was not notified about your comment, hopefully that has now been corrected. Any brand of the 570 should do. The drivers are the latest versions available from Nivida for OSX. I am not sure sure if it will work on 4.1 towers. I have seen people have some trouble with it on Creative Cow.
Thank You Luke! Sorry abut the late reply. I was not notified about your comment, hopefully that has now been corrected. Any brand of the 570 should do. The drivers are the latest versions available from Nivida for OSX. I am not sure sure if it will work on 4.1 towers. I have seen people have some trouble with it on Creative Cow.
Thank you very much for this article! I am also going to put this card in my Mac Pro 4.1 alongside the stock GT120 which a few people have told me they have done. Which adapter will i need for the display, or am i able to run the display off the GT120? Thank you.
@JmacHS you can run your display off the GT120, as long as you have the available slots. I am running one of my displays of my ATI card. Leaving all the heavy cuda lifting to my 570
Hi Tej,I installed a GTX570 into my Mac Pro 4,1 alongside my GT120. Installation of the CUDA drivers were a breeze and my mac has a new lease of life (from the GPU perspective).
Thanks for the article :-)
Cheers,
Bashir
@bashir I am glad to hear you got it working on your system.
Cheers !
You are welcome. Glad to help!
Hi Tej, i have a GTX 570 in my hand and a mac pro4.1 and it has two power connectors one is a 6 pin and one is an eighth pin, was this the same for you, if so did you use two six pin plugs like you talked about above with an adapter to change one to eight pin? Thanks in advance
@CormacFarrell No. I had the 6pin to mini 6pin. As mine is a 3.1 MacPro Tower. So the physical ports themselves are 6pin only, with no adapters. I just used the cable shown in the article above.
Maybe you need something like this ?
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200420CVF
@Tej Babra It’s a bit confusing, on the GPU (gtx 570, factory overclocked by gainward) there is a six pin and an 8 pin male power input, but i have just been reading the instructions and i think you only have to connect one of these either directly from your psu via the 6pin or there is an 8 pin adapter to use two available hard disk drive power connectors. I let ya know how it goes.
@CormacFarrell on my stock GTX570 there are 2 sockets for the 6pins. they both have to be plugged into the motherboard to gain enough power. If you have separate PSU, then that’s good too. But both plugs have to be plugged into a psu to get the correct voltage.
Let me know hot it goes.
Does this card also work with CS5.5?
@AntonioRuiRibeiro I am pretty sure it does. It currently works with my CS5 / and CS6. But you can always double check with Adobe supported cards for 5.5 .
@AntonioRuiRibeiro I am pretty sure it does. It currently works with my CS5 / and CS6. But you can always double check with Adobe supported cards for 5.5 .
I have Mac pro 3,1 running os 10.8.2 the gtx 570 works for everything CS6 but Premiere fails to open. I get warning “serious error occured…” and then it closes.
I am amazed you got it working with 10.8.2. There was some rumours of the card not playing well with 10.8.2. That error could mean anything. Was your OS upgrade a clean install or an upgrade? I find upgrade usually come with some driver issues.
@Tej Babra clean install
It’s hard for me to tell, as I am not on 10.8.2. Maybe installation of Premier went bad. It just does not make sense that all the other programs function, and PP fails. That may be the place to start, since all your other applications function.
I uninstalled and reinstalled PP and all is working now on the same system configuration. I’ve opened current Projects, scrubbed through, but have yet to edit.
Thats great. Just an FYI if you go to 10.8.3 there are new drivers for Nvidia cards that need to be installed or you will be in the boat again. Best of luck!