Apple has never supported externally located GPUs on either ExpressCard 34/54 connections or via Thunderbolt. Assuming this minor hurdle is jumped, then you have to get NVIDIA to support Thunderbolt. It's not a driver issue, it's a BIOS support issue.
Apple has never supported externally located GPUs on either ExpressCard 34/54 connections or via Thunderbolt. Assuming this minor hurdle is jumped, then you have to get NVIDIA to support Thunderbolt. It's not a driver issue, it's a BIOS support issue.
They hooked up a Mac Pro GT120 card in an expressCard viDock to a Macbook Pro and injected the card's framebuffer into the driver. PC cards wouldn't work without some EFI modification but Mac cards would be ok plus Windows 8 is adding UEFI support and will likely be the default on new computers and new GPUs.
NVidia is bringing out a new Quadro card for Mac Pros:
This at least shows NVidia can develop drivers for any card including Tesla cards for the Mac. It should be possible to get a UEFI card to boot over Thunderbolt using some basic driver modification. All that ATY_init seems to do is pass some values over to the driver at boot time. It would of course be far better if Apple/NVidia/AMD allowed this officially though even if they didn't offer the solutions.
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Apple has never supported externally located GPUs on either ExpressCard 34/54 connections or via Thunderbolt. Assuming this minor hurdle is jumped, then you have to get NVIDIA to support Thunderbolt. It's not a driver issue, it's a BIOS support issue.
Somebody has managed to get this to sort of work:
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=n&u=http://www.journaldulapin.com/2012/02/17/un-gpu-externe-sous-mac-os-x-vidock/
They hooked up a Mac Pro GT120 card in an expressCard viDock to a Macbook Pro and injected the card's framebuffer into the driver. PC cards wouldn't work without some EFI modification but Mac cards would be ok plus Windows 8 is adding UEFI support and will likely be the default on new computers and new GPUs.
NVidia is bringing out a new Quadro card for Mac Pros:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/nvida-announces-kepler-based-quadro-k5000-gpu-for-mac-pro/
and providing the drivers themselves:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-270.00.00f01-driver.html
This at least shows NVidia can develop drivers for any card including Tesla cards for the Mac. It should be possible to get a UEFI card to boot over Thunderbolt using some basic driver modification. All that ATY_init seems to do is pass some values over to the driver at boot time. It would of course be far better if Apple/NVidia/AMD allowed this officially though even if they didn't offer the solutions.