Nvidia 10 series in my old 5,1 Mac

[theaveragedave]

I barely ever post here so apologies if I'm posting in the wrong place. I couldn't find a Mac forum here.

I have a 6 year old 2010 Mac Pro that I am keeping alive with meager hardware upgrades in anticipation of the iMac being released this fall. Premiere really drags with even just Lumetri Color applied to GH4 H264 footage. Because I will not be with this system much longer I don't want to put much more cash into it, but I am considering buying a GTX 1050 Ti for $140 and trying it in my tower now that Nvidia has Mac drivers out for their 10 series cards. I would keep my Radeon 5770 for whenever I need a boot screen.

Is this a terrible idea or the best idea in the entire universe? Any power requirements I'm not considering? Better bang for the buck? (I'm not looking to spend over $150.)

Here are my current system specs:

Mac Pro (Mid 2010)

Processor: 3.33 Ghz 6-Core Intel Xeon

Memory: 24GB 1066 Mhz DDR3

Startup Disk: Pci SSD

Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB

Thanks anyone who takes the time to respond! Very little on the web yet about this stuff.

[RoninEdits · Accepted solution]

a faster video card will help if you are having performance problems after adding gpu based fx, like lumetri. if the performance is bad before you have added any gpu fx you may want to transcode to prores or cineform to improve performance. if you plan on doing lots of gpu fx and/or lumetri a gtx 1060 6gb might be a better choice, otherwise a 1050 ti 4gb should be able to handle a few gpu fx.

[theaveragedave]

Thanks Ronin!

I'm gonna do it.

[theaveragedave]

This was the best idea in the entire universe. I went from dropping half of my frames in 1/2 resolution editing 4k footage with multiple lumetri effects applied to being able to play back with no dropped frames in full resolution. Amazing!

I'll report back if any weird stuff happens due to this being a Windows card. Nothing so far though besides no boot screen.

[RoninEdits]

good to hear the new nvidia driver and card is working well in mac os. a future nvidia driver update may slightly improve performance and/or stability as this was a new driver launch.

[theaveragedave]

I had my first shut-down crash just now after attempting to play a warp stabilizer clip that had not been rendered yet. I will not do that again.

I had similar crashes when I had a GTX 680 Mac edition installed a couple years ago. That card costed me $600 and only gave me a 25% speed increase so I returned it.

The one thing I'll say for the 5770 is that it just works. Albeit at a snail's pace.

[susanr39425918]

I have a similar issue to theaveragedave.  Switching from FCP7 to Premiere Pro, currently have:

Mac Pro (Mid 2010)

Processor 2x2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon

Memory 14 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB

When playing back on timeline with color correction, everything is choppy, tons of dropped frames, audio goes out of sync.  Adobe says I need a new GPU.  That GTX 1050 Ti looks like about what I'd like to spend (having the same issue of not wanting to put a ton of money into this machine).  Could you explain about no boot screen and how that works?  And would that affect things if I was trying to run FCP 7 which I sometimes default to when I need to do something ultra fast?

And how do you boot when you have no boot screen?

How about the other "Adobe tested" cards such as GTX 750M? It seems to me they are quite a bit older.  My apologies since I am totally new to all of this stuff.  FCP 7 still works almost flawlessly on this computer, even with Sierra 10.12.4.  But I know I have to move on. 

Thanks to all who have any suggestions. 

[theaveragedave]

Hey Susan,

Those are are good questions. I am just starting to learn about GPU stuff myself.

The lack of boot screen, as far as I know, just means that if you ever need to do a system recovery from a different drive or recover from a Time Machine backup you will need to install your 5770 again temporarily. Otherwise it has no effect on booting up.  It just skips that first boot screen with the Apple logo and goes right to the part with the status bar. The reason for this is that Windows cards don't have their functionality kick in until after the boot screen comes up on a Mac.

I don't know anything about the 750M except that it's much slower than the 1050 Ti in comparison and definitely pricier for that Mac version. I experience the same quirks with my unsupported 5770 that I am with my 1050 Ti like the Lumetri Color filter behaving a bit erratically when I select different LUTs. It's just a small bother though.

The only my thing you'll have do in order to make the 1050Ti compatible with your system is to download the 10 series drivers for Mac from Nvidia's website. You should also be sure to select CUDA rather than OpenCL for acceleration in the project settings and in Media Encoder if you use it.

To the best of my knowledge you should have no trouble running FCP7 with the 1050Ti but I'm also guessing that FCP7 won't take advantage of much of the acceleration that the card offers.

As as I mentioned earlier I've had a few system crashes since installing this new card but between driver updates from NVIDIA making it more stable and the time saved in rendering effects constantly this has not worried me at all.

[theaveragedave]

After putting my new GPU through a bunch of different types of projects I've been able to boil down the crashes to specific causes:

-Photos with high DPI (they just need to be re-saved as smaller)

-Sped up video (needs to rendered and replaced)

-Basically any element that normally causes the sequence to drop every frame once it gets to it due to being complex.

I still prefer this over my previous situation because Lumetri effects always play fine, but I'm wondering if anyone has an idea why my system is shutting itself off when this happens rather than just slowing to a crawl like my 5770. I found another thread where Mac users were having kernel panics with Nvidia cards so I know I'm not alone.

[susanr39425918]

Getting ready to pull the trigger on the 1050 Ti; I see a website that specializes in Mac vid cards offers the 1080 Ti for about 6 times the price of the one you got.  I'm sure it's flashed for Mac, but if the only side effect you've had is no boot screen, could certainly live with that.  Which one did you wind up getting, the one with dual fans or single? Don't want to spend a fortune on this computer since it is getting on in years.  Any last words of advice before I order?

[theaveragedave]

I went single fan. I didn't see how much more the dual fan was. Maybe that dual one will crash less due to less overheating? I really dont know.

I would caution you to to look out for causes of crashes early and find workarounds so you don't get crashed on too many times. Set your autosaves to 5 or 10 minutes. I also get nervous about a computer crashing that hard, that it will have lasting effects somehow, so I really steer clear now of the situations I mentioned above. all that said, I dont think I could be happier with a $140 holdover before a new iMac this fall than I am with this card.

Please keep us posted with your results!

[Keith Moreau]

I am currently have a maxed out Mac Pro 5,1 - I have the 980t with the Macvidcards flash - I was getting lots of hard crashes until I researched that Cuda could be the culprit. I removed all Cuda drivers and support files from my system but still used Opencl gpu acceleration- works just as fast without the crashing. i think Adobe and nvidia support for opencl has pretty much caught up to cuda.

I also have an unflashed nvidia and it works just as well if not better than the flashed version - but when you need to update drivers - which will happen often with system updates - and then you have to VNC or swap video cards if you forget to update the drivers prior to the update - pita!

I talk about this and more in my filmmaking podcast "TechMove" www.techmovepodast.com

[IAH Digital]

Not just with Nvidia cards my friend. I have a Mac Pro 5.1 with dual 3.46 xeons and an AMD RX 580 card for my second system. Anytime I drop RED footage onto a Premiere timeline my system shuts down cold. I mean NO POWER. After this the power button wont even work. I have to unplug the power and then plug it back in to get it to boot.

CONCLUSION:

Adobe Premiere is a windows tool. It DOES NOT PLAY WELL IN MAC OS. I've had problems with my GTX 680 and the RX 58o in Premiere.

[theaveragedave]

It's really frustrating that the video cards that Adobe has approved as compliant for Mac are all either 5+ years old or only in stock configurations.

External GPUs are going to start becoming more and more commonplace and if users have to keep dodging issues like this it's either going to push them to FCP or force them to switch to Windows. I'm not relishing either option.

[theaveragedave]

A new issue I'm having kind of out-of-the-blue is that while editing I'll suddenly get a black program monitor. Switching to other acceleration methods in Project Settings is no use. I have to restart Premiere. The it will work for another couple hours before happening again.

This is a big pain when I have lots of bins open in thumbnail mode that I'm using to give me a better scope of all my b-roll as the generated thumbnails have to all be regenerated again upon re-launch.

[Keith Moreau]

Yeah, when I just used software only or chose OpenCL instead of CUDA, I was still having instability which could be black screen, no playback, artifacting on the screen. So I thought the same thing. If it's CUDA, how come these things are happening when I deselect it as the MPE acceleration method...

So I just bit the bullet and actually went to the trouble to REMOVE all CUDA files from my Mac. There are other threads on the forums here about where those files are and you can do some advanced searches and find them too. There are a lot of them. I didn't feel too worried because you can always reinstall it pretty easily. Lo and behold, no more crashes, black screens or other weirdness. I kind of feel that the CUDA part of the Nvidia drivers for these PCI cards is buggy. And even if Premiere Pro says it's not using it, I think it still does here and there or other parts of the OS use it or at least do checking to see if it's operational.

As our Mac 5,1s get older, there will be less and less support for them. Nvidia doesn't really make money on the handful of people that use their PCI cards on Mac towers, so to pay somebody to engineer and test it is a lot to ask. I'm really happy they are doing this or I wouldn't even be able to use their cards, but still, it's kind of like using 'beta' software.

Anyway my 2 cents. I went through instability for maybe a year like this especially when working in 4K and upgrading to my 980ti card (which forced me to update to 10.10 anyway. Now I"m on 10.11 because I was dabbling with FCP X). I actually discuss this in the latest episode of my podcast, www.techmovepodcast.com

[theaveragedave]

That is tempting but I found when I was running in OpenCL mode that playback was not that much better than on my old card. I'm going to try a few other fixes first like trashing prefs and cleaning my caches. Definitely glad to know that there's that option for me as well. Thanks!

[theaveragedave]

I had a brief scare today. My computer that I had left on overnight had no signal going to the displays. I tried my old card which worked fine and noticed that I had a new NVIDIA driver ready to download. It occured to me that NVIDIA may have auto-installed a driver that crippled my system and then immediately afterward issues a new driver to fix it. Sure enough, after I installed the newest driver and then put the card back in it worked as normal. Phew!

The cost of adding a Windows-based card to a Mac on beta driver I suppose.

[ccccyyyycccc]

hey theaveragedave, thanks for sharing this upgrade and updating the issues. i'm sharing similar situation as you had.

I got a MacPro 5.1 with El Capitan installed. I use a lot of Premiere and some After Effects but the Radeon HD 5770 just dragging the editing. I'm thinking to upgrade to either nVidia 1060 or AMD  RX 570, still doing some research on them. Can I ask what OS you are on? There're some successful threads people get nVidia 10 series working with Sierra but most the driver updates say it's for High Sierra. And it looks like Mac will have better support for AMD cards. I surely don't want to update to High Sierra so still debating which brand to go for.

Can you share which version of OS you are on, and where you get the driver for 1050? If I also need to edit high res photo in Photoshop, would that be a problem considering your experience? many thanks