Just took delivery of my new HD 4870 video card today. I installed it in my Early 2008 Mac Pro and booted up. I got a picture no problem on one monitor, but nothing on the other. Furthermore, the display perfpane was missing a lot of controls, like Arrangement and Detect Displays and whatnot.
I did a bunch of rebooting and swapping of cables, and determined that both the mini-display port and the standard DVI connection will drive a monitor. However, if both are plugged in, the only active display is the one plugged into the mini-display port, and there's no option to setup the secondary display.
So I booted into bootcamp, and it automatically recognized both display ports, and mirrored my desktop on both monitors. I downloaded and installed the latest windows drivers, rebooted the machine into windows once more, and was able to configure a multiple monitor display with no problem.
This tells me it's not the card and it's not the motherboard.
Booting back into mac OS, I discovered that it doesn't even recognize that the card has video ram. It thought I had no video ram in the system.
So, this all leads me to the conclusion that Apple shipped me a card that it has not yet provided driver support for.
Hey Apple, can I have my 4870 display driver now?
I did a bunch of rebooting and swapping of cables, and determined that both the mini-display port and the standard DVI connection will drive a monitor. However, if both are plugged in, the only active display is the one plugged into the mini-display port, and there's no option to setup the secondary display.
So I booted into bootcamp, and it automatically recognized both display ports, and mirrored my desktop on both monitors. I downloaded and installed the latest windows drivers, rebooted the machine into windows once more, and was able to configure a multiple monitor display with no problem.
This tells me it's not the card and it's not the motherboard.
Booting back into mac OS, I discovered that it doesn't even recognize that the card has video ram. It thought I had no video ram in the system.
So, this all leads me to the conclusion that Apple shipped me a card that it has not yet provided driver support for.
Hey Apple, can I have my 4870 display driver now?
I haven't been able to find detailed specifications for the ati radeon hd 4870 mac edition. The PC version specs show 'accelerated transcoding and decoding for H.264 and Mpeg2'. Is this on the Mac version? Is it accessed/useful when compressing video to H.264 and Mpeg2? Onto modification of PC 4870 cards to work properly in a Mac Pro: (by pipomolo42) This will necessitate a PC to extract the card's ROM. You will also need the Mac 4870 ROM posted in the now lengthy thread about this. Get the 128k vgabios of your PC card. (pc4870.rom) Get the Mac 4870 ROM, and get the fixrom.py script pipomolo42 prepared for.
Mac Pro (early 2008), Mac OS X (10.5.6)
Hd 4870
Radeon 4870 Review
Radeon Hd 4870 X2
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