Disclaimer: if you’ve stumbled across this article don’t attempt these steps without reading through the whole post and know that if you do screw something up your system may not boot again properly until you put your drive into another Mac or Hackintosh and undo your changes.

When I first purchased my ultimate Hackintosh machine, I bought the EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 card. I did so foolishly without first finding out whether it was “supported” by OS X or the Hacktinosh community at large.  I just got it because it sounded awesome and like a typical Linux user, assumed the drivers will come later.

Before we get going with the solution to getting the GTX 570 card working, here’s my system specs:

• Asus P6X58D-E Motherboard
• Intel i7 970 processor 3.2GHz 6 Cores, 12 threads
• 6 – 4GB Kingston DDR3 1333MHz – 24GB RAM
• 2 – 2TB Western Digital Black SATA3 6GB/s drives

After a few attempts I was able to get the GTX 570 to boot and after a few more I was able to get it to boot up with correct resolution detection, it wasn’t until 24 hours later that I was able to get everything to boot up with OpenGL (which was the biggest headache).

Okay so here’s what I had to do to get it working… I ran into countless dead ends with OS X 10.7.0 so, refusing to be beat, I updated to 10.7.1 and that’s when everything started working correctly for me.

I’m running:

• Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 Update
• Chimera 1.5.4 (which added a device ID for the GTX 570)

Another important note with my rig is that my EVGA NVIDIA GTX 570 has the device ID 1081.  There are others which have 1086 instead and so they need different configuration modifications than those listed below.  (Possibly just changing 1081 to 1086 wherever it’s listed below)

First thing’s first, once you have OS X 10.7.1 installed, you need to edit the /System/Library/Extensions/NVDAGF100Hal.kext/Contents/Info.plist to add the device ID for your video card. I like to do stuff right from the Terminal though there are countless helper apps, so first let’s create a Backup folder for all of the files we’re going to break in case we need the originals again…

Now let’s add our device IDs..

Add your device ID to the IOPCIPrimaryMatch key list, mine is 1081 but yours may be 1086. The 10de part is nVidia’s vendor ID, in case you’re wondering. That’s why they’re all the same.

With this addition your system should boot up and you should have the correct resolution for your monitor instead of being stuck at 1024×768. YouTube videos will play but you won’t be able to use any OpenGL or OpenCL like watching a video with VLC or opening Chess.

Next thing I added was ATY_init.kext which set things in motion.  Once downloaded and unzipped…

There are three more files I needed to modify to get everything swimming along, the first was /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist or, in my case since I’m running Chimera 1.5.4 /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist In there I needed to disable the Graphics Mode by setting it to a blank string and add a Hex EFI String for the GTX 570 card. My Kernel Flags section also needed to be modified as it had something about i386 in it. Here’s my /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist (update sept 16 at bottom of this post has new file)

To generate my HEX string I used OSX86Tools. Open it up (reboot may be required?) and press Add EFI Strings/Boot Flag in the bottom box. Click on the GFX Strings button in the dialog box that pops up and then for Graphics Card choose Custom GeForce… at the bottom. Enter: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 for the name, Custom… for the VRAM and enter: 0x50000000 which equates to 1280MB. Select DVI-I / DVI-I and continue.

I just used the HEX value generated in the bottom window and created my new device-properties key manually. I didn’t use the program to manipulate the org.chameleon.Boot.plist file, I did it via Terminal manually.

So now the system will boot and not set the graphics mode and it will be told that it’s OpenGL capable. The next file I changed was a hex change from netkas to enable OpenCL for the card. So let’s back up the files and make them user-editable.

Now let’s use HexEdit and follow netkas’ instructions on our /Users//Desktop/GeForceGLDriver file.

Find
a883f8028b45f0
replace 02 with 03 to get
a883f8038b45f0

Find
ea83f802498b
replace 02 with 03 to get
ea83f803498b

So with our Desktop copy of the file patched and our original safely backed up let’s put this one into place…

So now there’s just one more file left to tweak, it’s the AppleGraphicsPowerManagement or AGPM. For our changes to take effect the system type has to match our defined system type and our GTX 570’s device ID. So I used Multibeast from tonymacx86 to change my system type to iMac12,2 because that’s what others had done and that’s where the changes in this file seem to be.

Open up /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext/Contents/Info.plist and edit the section which begins with iMac12,2 to be as follows:

So! After making all of those changes and rebooting, I was succesfully able to boot, MUCH faster than ever before and once the system booted up OpenGL/CI worked videos play in VLC, youtubes tube, and 3D benchmarks in NovaBench and Xbench don’t crash the system anymore.

I tossed the EVGA nVidia GeForce GTX 465 in the second PCI Express slot and without any futher alterations I have quad monitors with 1920×1080 each. There’s a slight flicker when I move a playing video from one monitor on one card to another but I seem to be able to play them halfway between each just fine.

A big thanks goes to the materials found from these threads on tonymacx86’s forum and InsanelyMac’s. Wouldn’t have been possible for me to figure this out without all of their leg work.

Update [sept 13]: after only two days of use I noticed that my sound card wasn’t working. I used Multibeast to add in the missing kext files and I’ve been working on recovering from that ever since. I can boot the system fine, but once again no OpenGL. In the process of trying to fix things I’ve updated to the new Chameleon layout which got rid of /Extras/Extensions and added UseKernelCache key. If I don’t boot using the kernel cache, I can’t boot. If I do use the kernel cache, it ignores my Graphics Mode declaration (I’m guessing that’s why the OpenGL isn’t working). Trial and error is becoming extremely annoying, but I will solve this… and then never update my system again.

Update [sept 16]: after a week more of trial and error, I’ve got everything working correctly again, I’ve had to alter my org.chameleon.Boot.plist because with the new Chimera versions it seems the Graphics Mode function is ignored, BUT, I think the only thing we need to avoid is declaring the graphics mode to the card before the OS boots (so the OpenGL) will work. So to do so we can just boot with -v and the graphics mode will only get set once the OS boots. Here’s my new /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist

Check out the write-up on 10.7.2 for more.