Pomaikai wrote: »

I still have the sparkling lines where textures are woven together to form landscapes. [/url]

Video card drivers will never make those go away. We have had them since Morrowind.

It's not. It was just updated this past week.

Did you download and try it?

That's fine. You can continue using the exact same old driver released with V1.0 of El Capitan until the next version of OSX is released in what? A year from now?

These are the drivers that NVIDIA updates for new game releases, as well as performance increases for existing games,like ESO.

I'll keep using them and enjoy the performance gains. You folks do what you want. I'll most certainly not make any further performance enhancement type posts in the future.

Sounds like you got your feelings hurt. We all appreciate any attempts to help boost performance on our Macs. Perhaps it would have been better to point out that it only works with 3 Mac Pro models, 2 iMac models (one being the model you have), and 3 Macbook Pro models. (as KhajitFur Trader noted above)

Pomaikai wrote: »

I'll keep using them and enjoy the performance gains. You folks do what you want. I'll most certainly not make any further performance enhancement type posts in the future.

Wow!! Even the internet's behind in 3rd world countries..

Beta Trap? Good Lord, but we play one of those each and every day! It's called ESO...

Having been a PC user for decades I've used NVIDIA and AMD beta drivers constantly, because they were continuously updated and tweaked to provide better gaming performance in between official releases which rolled all those fixes, tweaks, and updates into one larger release. If you didn't game, you waited for official releases.

However, those official releases still occurred regularly, unlike Mac official releases which happen exactly once per year, roughly, when Apple updates OSX. Until these new Web Drivers, Mac gamers had to suck it up and suffer through old and dated graphics drivers which didn't keep up with current games. It's one of the reasons gaming has usually suffered and sucked on a Mac.

WEB browse away on the staid once a year Apple drivers all you want, but if you game on your Mac, you should always be looking for ways to eek out that last bit of performance from your machine. These Web Drivers offer one of the few performance gains that Mac users can avail themselves of.

Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, prior to installing these Web Drivers on my Mid-2013 27" iMac, PVP on any scale larger than a few actual players other than myself was horrible. My FPS was so low I only saw a few frames per second. In a large battle, 3-12 FPS with zone reloads and disconnects were all I ever got. PVP was unplayable. 1v1 in a delve could lag so bad I'd die unable to do anything. Now? I can actually play and kill other players! PVP is fun for the very first time.

If your Mac is on the list of supported models, even if it's officially only beta support at this time, you'll see higher FPS when playing ESO. If having the game smoother and more responsive is important to you, then try them out. If you don't like them, then download the current drivers from Apple and revert back.

And seriously, all this sturm unt drang about seamless use from the person who advocated a mini hack of the launcher earlier this year? Really?

Quite frankly, at this level of development, I don't care. Because of Apple's miserly release schedule, those drivers will always be beta. They'll be beta until they become the release drivers, and they'll be beta again the day after when NVIDIA rolls out the next set of improvements. It's just too danged easy to revert to the release drivers not to try them.

Again, you're still arguing against something you refuse to even test. It's silly.

Except we're not in an IT department of a business. We're gamers trying to get the best possible performance out of our game.

Stop playing games at work.

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

Well, resorting to unfounded assumptions won't help making your point more valid either.

Ah, but that's exactly what you did!

The complaints started off with it being a very old driver, until that was countered. Then it was just for improving performance in graphic design programs until I linked the NVIDIA blog that was just about it improving your FPS in games. Finally we get to it being dangerous to install.

Mate, you've got a lot of weight in this particular forum and have helped a lot of Mac users. That's much appreciated. However all you've done here is attempt to use FUD; Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to dissuade Mac users from even trying it.

Warning people that there might be issues if they try them is one thing, but it should be done as a pro and con argument, and quite frankly you should have tested their stability yourself before you "reviewed" them as the resident Mac expert.

"Funny" story - not long after reading about this driver (in a different thread) I gave it a try. It seemed to work fine and I did see a small performance boost in ESO, so I kept running it.

Fast forward to this past Friday - was a "guest lecturer" in our 3rd grade classes for a lab on forces, motion, and magnetism. I developed the collateral for the lab, with animations, etc, to be displayed on the classroom "smart board" (for me, basically a projection display with a VGA connector to the computer) as the class went through the lab. Went to start the first class, and plugged the VGA into my Mac (mini display port to VGA adapter that I had used previously without issues), and CRASH - Mac goes down! Force restart, won't even come up! No time to deal with it so do the lab "manually". In the 30 minute break before the next class my Mac comes back up fine (no longer plugged into the smart board), and when class starts, same thing when I plug in the VGA - CRASH! I just closed the lid and did the remaining labs of the day "manually" (it worked out ok regardless).

When I got home and opened up my Mac, the "report" screen was open, so I selected "ok" and looked at the crash report. There it was - Nvidia web driver had crashed! So if you do use this driver, be aware that it truly may not be as robust as that shipped with the OS. I'm fine running it for games, but the next time I need high availability I'll be sure to switch back to the native driver, just in case! This on a Macbook Pro, BTW.

Have you checked to see if there a new drivers out for the Smartboard as well?

Thanks for the heads up though. Appreciated.

wubsylol wrote: »

They are not 'beta' drivers, my gosh don't be ridiculous. These drivers are the only available drivers to run a Maxwell GPU (like the 980, not a Quadro) on a Mac Pro.

I want to debunk the first part of the statement given, which is clearly false:

• Includes BETA support for iMac and MacBook Pro systems with NVIDIA graphics

Release Notes Archive:
This driver update is for Mac Pro 5,1 (2010), Mac Pro 4,1 (2009) and Mac Pro 3,1 (2008) users.

BETA support is for iMac 14,2 / 14,3 (2013), iMac 13,1 / 13,2 (2012) and MacBook Pro 11,3 (2013), MacBook Pro 10,1 (2012), and MacBook Pro 9,1 (2012) users.

This is from the driver's latest release version, dated 5/27/2016. It can't be more clear that these drivers are in beta state for anything but the Mac Pro -- the part that they are not in beta for the Mac Pro itself has never been disputed by anyone, btw.

And not to further ride a dead horse here: your personal attacks against me as a person doesn't help your argument in any way. You can of course talk about your personal experience that you've made with these drivers, and I invite you to provide benchmarks/FPS comparisons (preferably being relevant to ESO) to back up your propositions.

I have laid out extensively in several posts above the reasons why I wouldn't want to use them, and why I feel that anyone who does want to use them should be aware of potential problems, i.e. should make an informed decision. Calling this "ridiculous", repeatedly, just tells me that you really don't seem to have to say something substantial.

Edit: I also suggest that you inform yourself about Apple's graphics driver practices before making unfounded statements like "they are over two years old". They do get (minor) updates with every sub-version update of OS X, i.e. the most recent one came with 10.11.5 just last month. El Capitan itself, which brought the last major update, is less than a year old. Here's a good read for starters.