GTX 470, GTX 285, PPro, and Mac Pro 3,1

[Chris Borjis]

there are unsupported ways of making non-list approved cards working
by editing a text file. google that.

if it works great, if not, there’s no support to help you.

[Charles Mcintyre]

You may want to check the Adobe Premiere Pro forum on this. The last I heard, Mac Pro’s are restricted to the Nvidia Quadro cards if you want to utilize the Mercury Playback Engine. The 4000 is the model working for Mac users if memory serves me. The Nvidia GTX’s won’t work on the Mac Pro. Now there IS the hack that works on PC’s with unlisted cards. You may need to use the hack to get the Quadro 4000 to work on the Mac. I can’t recall, I’m not a Mac user.

Here is one thread in the Adobe Hardware Forum that MAY answer some of your questions:
https://forums.adobe.com/message/4274646#4274646

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

Here is an Adobe article that could make for smoother sailing:

https://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2011/06/quadro-4000-driver-and-cuda-driver-update-for-mac-osx-v10-6-8.html

Chuck

[Chris Borjis]

I have a quadro 4000 on my mac pro.

it’s the one made for the mac so it works perfectly
without a hack of course.

[David Pirinelli]

The mercury Engine requires 3 things:

1. CUDA 1.1 support (ie, G92 or newer)
2. 768 MB of VRAM
3. Cards name to appear in a simple text file

They could have put the “supported cards list” into a compressed or compiled file that would have been difficult to modify, but instead they placed it in a very basic level text file that anyone can modify with “text edit”. They MEANT for end users to have ability to add cards.

The CUDA 1.1 requirement means the Quadro 5600 isn’t able to work, since it uses CUDA 1.0 only. This also rules out all of the G80 cards with 768 Megs, unfortunately. (8800GTX, 8800 Ultra, Quadro 4600)

But G92 is 8800GT is new enough, but most are 512 Meg and get ruled out that way. The rarer 1GB version of 8800GT WILL enable Mercury…WHEN IT’S NAME IS ADDED To THE LIST.

The list is found here:

“/Applications/Adobe\ Master\ Collection/Adobe\ Premiere\ Pro\ CS5/Adobe\ Premiere\ Pro\ CS5.app/Contents/cuda_supported_cards.txt”

Or you can read the long winded version here:

https://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5-faq.htm

They give instructions for using Terminal to do this, but you can just navigate to the folder and do it yourself.

Note that you must use the name as it appears in system profiler. And for some reason CUDA 4.050 has trouble with some G92 cards but going back to CUDA 4.0129 will make it work

The Quadro 4000 and Fermi GTX470 are based on nearly the exact same card and drivers. So if a Quadro 4000 works, a GTX470 will work too, once it’s name is added to the list.

[Dieter Heinz]

Hi all.

Thanks David, seems like good news for me. That was about the answer I was hoping for 🙂 And interesting link!

I think I´ll go for a GTX 470 then.

It´s just the other thread confused me a bit about power issues in general. Long time ago, a friend of mine fried a G4 on a PSU issue, so I want to stay on the safe side. For my PSU it doesn´t seem to be much a difference though between the 285 and the 470, just different connectors.

I´ll have to do some research on this. Will report back.

Thanx so far guys!
KH

[Robert Brown]

My gtx 285 is working great on a 12 core mac pro in osx and win7

Robert Brown
Editor/VFX/Colorist – FCP, Smoke, Quantel Pablo, After Effects, 3DS MAX, Premiere Pro

https://vimeo.com/user3987510/videos

[James Drake]

I was amazed when the system I built with a 570GTX natively enabled the MPE when I opened Premiere for the first time with no modifications at all, running Lion OS 10.7.3

[David Pirinelli]

This is good news since we just started selling Mac EFI GTX570