GFX Strings - DUAL CARDS - How To

[gerbitos]

Hi..

Just want to ask you :

if my nvcap string is bad, how can I create a real good nvcap string

I use nvflash in Dos mode to dump my card and nvcap maker to show the string..

thanks a lot...

[gerbitos]

hi there,
i tried reading the ioreg outputs and get my PCIe adresses from there but i have no sucess in interpret/converting the output.
the NVCAP string i got from a dos prog nvflash, but even if i choose DVI/DVI it doesnt work.

often when i reboot i get stuck at the boot and cant resolve the problem even in single user mode. rebooting from cdrom/and removing DSDT.aml/ resetting com.apple.Boot.plist to default values permit a sucessfull reboot.

i can provide a ioreg dump and any other log data needed but i seem to miss the problem.
i have seen a lot of different plist entries to populate the plist to generate the gfxstring but i dont know which ones are needed.
any suggestions are welcome.

[kamisama]

Hi aquamac,

I'm a newbie who've just step into the osx86 world.
I've read your thread about dual graphic card (thanks for the tuto), and I still don't get some parts.

Do you mean that we can dual boot *any* Nvidia graphic card, with just combining each card .plist (like those in EFIstudio, after editing it with the right pci root), instead of editing your in.plist file ?

Does the cards must be dual DVI to work with a dual display ? Or any port will work (VGA/HDMI) ?

I've also read somewhere in this thread that 8800 is better than 9800 .... In fact, I haven't decided on which card to buy yet, so I'm trying to understand if your tutorial will work with any nvidia card. I currently have 2 ATI 4850, and I finally understand that dual ati is not possible .... T_T

Hope someone can enlightened me a bit, and thanks for the hard work ^^

[aquamac]

The success of getting dual cards working in OSX 86 is as much to do with your motherboard as it is to do with your graphics card. some motherboards just cannot boot with dual cards in. Some have to be set to boot from PEG 2 if that option is available, whilst some others are fine. Unfortunately there is no definitive list anywhere, it's all trial and error. I have managed to boot dual cards with the following boards,

Asus P5E3 wireless@n - Dual GTX 280 Cards
Asus P6T6 Workstation - Dual 9800 GTX, Dual GTX 280, Single 9800 GX2 in slot 1
Asus P6T7 Supercomputer - Dual 9800 GTX, Dual GTX 280, Single 9800 GX2 in slot 1, Triple GTX 280.
Gigabyte X48-DQ6 (Set for PEG 2) - Dual 9800 GTX Cards.

If anyone else would like to add their Motherboard/Graphics card successes/failures here it would be helpful.

gerbitos,

To get your PCI addresses you neen to boot either Vista or windows 7. Go to device manager and double click each of your cards one at a time. Select the tab that says Details then from the drop down box, select "Location Paths" and copy and paste the 2 addresses.

[kamisama]

I thinkg that my motherboard (P5Q-PRO) can run 2 graphic card, I've ran 4 monitors on Windows for a long time, and I've tried 2 ATI Radeon 4850 in Snow Leopard, but cannot have hardware acceleration on the slot-2 card. That's why I want to switch to Nvidia, and hope all will work smoothly.

I've got my eyes on 2 9600GT (or GSO). Does anyone have success with these cards ? Must these cards have 2 DVI port, or Nvidia driver can run monitors on HDMI and VGA port too ?

[gerbitos]

thanks a lot for your support aqua !!

but I did that.. I installed win 7 and see the pci address like you wrote.. but I do that with my 2 cards installed..

maybe I need to do that with one card
(one time for the pci-e 1 and next with pci-e 5 (the second blue port))

I don't know...

soon I will try with a 9500gt and a 7300gs just to see if it's better...

but I don't hope so..

now I'm a little bit demotivated... :-(

[aquamac]

gerbitos,

Do you have the option to boot from PEG 2 in your bios - I cannot remember.

[gerbitos]

no.. I don't have this option

The only options I can have :

the PCI-e voltage

the PCI-e spread spectrum (??)

PCI/pnp (yes or no)

thanks..

[focher]

Hi,

I am fine with how the whole process works to generate the EFI string. However, I have 3 GTX280 cards and am unable to get a 2 or 3 card combination working. Some details:

1) I have Snow Leopard running fine with a single GTX280 and its EFI string.
2) Is it true that gfxutil should be used from Leopard only? I read that it does not give the correct EFI string under Snow Leopard.
3) My motherboard is an nForce 790i Ultra based board, and does not let me move the cards around to get the PCI Root details. I have looked at the Location Path under Windows 7, but am not sure how this should be "converted" to the PCI Root format in the plist.
4) For my third card, am I correct to have simply made multiple copies of the whole <key>PciRoot</key> section? I used the in.plist that aquamac has already provided for dual GTX280s and just added a third key branch for the third card.
5) SLI bridge - Someone mentioned that I need to ensure the bridge is not even connected. I know SLI is not supported, but want to check whether having the bridge installed causes a problem.
6) nVidia drivers - Now that there are nVidia drivers available, are those preferred for usage?
7) PEG2 - What exactly is this BIOS boot option? I do have "primary display at boot" type option. Is that it?

thanks a lot for any and all help

[aquamac]

Focher,

To give you an idea of how to convert your strings from windows to mac - see below:

Windows Strings:
PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0300)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0000)
PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0300)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0200)#PCI(0000)
PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0700)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0000)

Mac Strings:
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x3,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x3,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x2,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x7,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)

These are for my 3 GTX 280's on an Asus P6T7 Board.

Yes you are right, snow leopard does not generate the strings correctly - it can find your PCIe addresses fine but you need to generate the strings in Leo.

You can leave your SLi bridge in position - it will not effect the way your mac sees the cards and is totally ignored by Leo or Snow.

Do not mess with any drivers - they are already supplied with Leo or Snow. The GFX strings just point your drivers that are already in your operating system at the hardware.

PEG 2 is the option to boot your system from the second graphics card. For some reason this helps in booting, when booting from the first card fails. Not all bios's have this and not all bios's need to have this set when using 2 cards. My P6T7 does not have this option but works OK anyway. It looks like "Primary Display at Boot" is similar, but that depends what the other option is.

Gerbitos,

Yes you need to find the PCIe addresses individually - one at a time.

[serich159]

Hi All,
I’ve been lurking, reading for a week now trying to get my tri-head system up and running. I’ve found a lot of valuable information here, and think I’m just missing one or two minor details. Any help would be appreciated.

Currently: Can boot fine w/ PEG, all three monitors display. If I attempt to enter into the display properties, or attempt to move a chess piece, or really anything to use 3d/accelerated graphics or attempt to change anything, I get a segfault. I took screen caps of my cards in profiler (see link at bottom). (One interesting note, I can’t take screen shots on my primary card, had to drag the window to another monitor.)

Adjustments:
1) I followed the post over on digitaldj.net [ digitaldj.net/2009/09/02/snow-leopard-hackintosh-ga-ep45-extreme-multiple-video-cards-more/ ] and after some info here about needing to use 10.5 to generate the string got what I think is a correct EFI string installed in my /Extras/ folder. I put my graphics.plist and Boot.plist up at the bottom link.

2) I added the stub for the second graphics card to my DSDT.aml file, which now allows me to boot with all three displays shown. However if I take out everything but the stub for the first graphics card (as it looks like za5od did, but I could be doing that wrong), I get black screens where I should be getting the blue then desktop. (but the computer is running, as I can ssh in). I uploaded the dsdt.aml and dsdt.dsl at the link below as well. I think this may be where the issue is, but while I have lots of programming experience, this is not an area that I’ve ever ventured to.

Setup:
Nvidia GeForce 9400GT (512mb, evga, dvi/vga/svideo) in primary slot (1)
-- Main 22” via dvi (middle)
Nvidia GeForce 7600GS (256mb, dual dvi) in secondary slot (6)
-- 2x 20” via dvi (left / right)
Gigabyte EP45-UD3P w/ 2.83 C2Quad., 4gb memory. Booting PEG (not PEG2).
Snow Leopard 10.6.1 (Installed with the EP34UD3P installer from lifehacker). Chameleon 2.0rc2 booting from main drive.

I gathered all the files I used here if anyone has the time to look and tell me what they see wrong, I'd be grateful: [ erichsimmons.com/temp/apple/ ]

Thanks,
~serich

[aquamac]

serich159,

As card 1 shows as "NVIDIA Graphics Engine" I can only presume you have some kind of injector installed as well as DSDT.aml as well as strings in your com.apple.boot.plist. You should only use one method of data injection. Do you have NVInject.kext, NVKush.kext, NVDarwin.kext or some other form of injection in your System/Contents/Extensions folder? If you do this will override the strings and they will not work. If you want to use strings, then that should be the only form of injection.

[focher]

Hi,

I had to switch motherboards (from nForce 790i Ultra to 780i), but at least was able to obtain and confirm my PciRoot details for all three slots. Unfortunately, the EFI string I generated did not work.

One interesting thing is that the new PC_EFI 10.3 from netkas fixes the GraphicsEnabler detection process to include PciRoot(0x1) - the Chameleon RC3 code only detected cards on PciRoot(0x0). This shows my cards being detected at boot - with the one problem being that, if I have 3 cards in then 2 of them detect the VRAM at 4095MB. The third card detects properly at 1024MB. If I only have 1 or 2 cards, the VRAM amount is detected properly.

Still only way to a working desktop is to install only a single card.

Any guesses?

[aquamac]

Hi focher,

I also had a look inside Netkas's EFI 10.3. It seems it is only set up to find 1 graphics card, so will probably not work yet with what you are trying to do. I had thought about seeing if it was possible to change it to detect more, but at the moment I have little time (I am working all weekend!! - Writing this from work too). I think with more than 1 card Strings are still the way to go at the moment, but DSDT.aml is looking promising too for multi card setups. I am trying to get hold of the MAC EFI version rom saved from a Mac GTX 285 if anyone can save one AS I WANT TO EXPERIMENT LOADING THIS from the com.apple.boot.plist! So if anyone knows someone with one of these I would be most grateful.

[focher]

Hi aquamac,

Interesting, as during netkas' PC_EFI load, it shows all three cards as detected. That, of course, doesn't mean it is injecting the proper EFI string based on its results but it definitely is seeing all three cards (or 2, if only 2 inserted).

I also got a response from netkas in IRC. He only mentioned that he didn't do the NVIDIA detection code so wasn't able to provide any assistance about it.

I think if we can guide whoever is managing the Chameleon / PC_EFI code that handles the EFI injection to a working solution, this is the holy grail approach because it potentially works for so many more people.