Nvidia tosses cMP a bone, bootscreens

[Rominator]

Gtx 2080 has boot screens, they snuck it in while no one looking

Confirming report from EU

Now we just need drivers

[LightBulbFun]

very interesting

is this a full Apple EFI setup, enumerating all the NVDA properties in the device tree like a proper Mac card

or is it just enumerating the card just enough to work with the Apple graphics protocol and display a boot screen?

id be very interested to see what the card says in system profiler SANS drivers actually...

(In both Graphics/Displays and PCI Cards)

BTW is this from the create.pro thing or do you have someone else in europe confirming it? I know create pro has a less then clean track record so I am a bit skeptical of their reports

[crjackson2134]

Great news, I can’t afford one, but greatnews none the less. I guess all the naysayers (including myself) can rest easy now   

What a good year for the cMP this has been.

[lowrider]

So Dave

You're confirming the video from CreatePro.  Everyone was skeptical, including me.  You, I believe.  Now all we need is Mojave Drivers.  Oh, and it's RTX 2080.

Lou

[BillyBobBongo]

Man I hope this is also in the 2070, out of all the new cards that really seems the one to buy.

[Fl0r!an]

is this a full Apple EFI setup, enumerating all the NVDA properties in the device tree like a proper Mac card

The Nvidia UEFI shows no sign of any IOReg properties, just the definition of EFI_UGA_DRAW_PROTOCOL is there, as I postet @ MR. So in macOS it's most likely behaving like a normal PC card (which shouldn't be a problem, since the Mac drivers can init PC cards for almost 10 years now). So we just need to wait for RTX drivers...

[netkas]

seems true, snippet of code from ida of this new nvidia efi

// write access to const memory has been detected, the output may be wrong!
EFI_STATUS ModuleEntryPoint(EFI_HANDLE ImageHandle, EFI_SYSTEM_TABLE *SystemTable)
{

  if ( SystemTable->Hdr.Revision < 0x1000A )
    return EFI_INCOMPATIBLE_VERSION;
...

Let me guess - boot screen only works in one holds option key at startup, hence nobody figured this earlier

[LightBulbFun]

is that code snippet from the RTXs EFI or the MP5,1 138.0.0.0.0 EFI?

its all pretty interesting, because im guessing you need more then JUST UGA/GOP to get a EFI Boot screen on a MP5,1? (but I cant claim to know the exact details sadly)

[DarthnVader]

is this a full Apple EFI setup, enumerating all the NVDA properties in the device tree like a proper Mac card

The Nvidia UEFI shows no sign of any IOReg properties, just the definition of EFI_UGA_DRAW_PROTOCOL is there, as I postet @ MR. So in macOS it's most likely behaving like a normal PC card (which shouldn't be a problem, since the Mac drivers can init PC cards for almost 10 years now). So we just need to wait for RTX drivers...

Very interesting. So while people here were arguing why this couldn't be possible, I downloaded a random RTX ROM from TechPowerUp (Asus.RTX2080.8192.180831.rom) and had a brief look at it. Besides its enormous size (1MB, seems to contain to identical copies of the same VBIOS and UEFI) I found an interesting bit in the decompressed UEFI binary:

Offset 1A28: 8B29 2C98 FAF4 CB41 B838 77AA 688F B839
That's the definition of EFI_UGA_DRAW_PROTOCOL, sitting right next to the definition of EFI_GRAPHICS_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL_GUID (Offset 1A18)!

My experience with other UEFI ROMs is quite limited, but a quick look into an GM204 UEFI binary revealed just the GOP part, but no mention of UGA support (and as we all know, they won't output anything in a cMP unless flashed).

So this might actually be legit!

Does anyone have the EFI part of the D300/D500/D700 ROMs?

It would be interesting to know if they use this UGA_DRAW header too?

I wonder what is done on UEFI Macs, if they use this hack to get Apple Boot Screens, I also wonder what else is there, in these RTX ROMs, surely just adding 8B29 2C98 FAF4 CB41 B838 77AA 688F B839 to  a GOP rom isn't enough, is it?

Also Fl0r!an, what tool did you use to decompress the RTX ROM?

I tried UEFIRomExtract, but it doesn't find the EFI rom.

[Nick [D]vB]

Hi all, I can tell you the D300 EFI references both UGA & GOP GUIDs, but then so does every other AMD EFI I've checked,
as do multiple bootrom components of all intel Macs, even new ones that should have no business with UGA like the new iMacPro ?! 
Nvidia are all over the place to, older EFIs like the 8800 have both, but newer ones from the Kepler iMacs don't seem to reference either GUID ??

The repeating structure of the Turing roms is very odd, until someone verifies the actual EEPROM size I guess it could just be a bug in the dumping tool? or maybe some kind of dubious single chip bad-flash protection??  If you just hack out the EFI section UEFIromExtract will decompress it for you.  The 2070 EFI (v50006) looks very similar so no reason to think it won't have boot screens to, but if they're really going to dig their heels in over the CUDA issue then we might be waiting a long time for those drivers... 

I was just reading the thread over at MR, you guys should look into the "CoreEG2" DXE driver (4DDEAFA4-F480-4B9D-889B-1E3AE6605BD6) from the MP6,1 and newer iMac / Macbook bootroms.  It seems to be the base of the GOP console driver stack and serves a similar role on these machines to the Legacy VGA  / AGP driver (8A107CC5-DCDA-4FB7-A272-4243B41AFBFE) and VGA Bridge port driver (BC6D08DC-865D-4FFE-8B7A-FB5FB04F12F1) found on older UGA Macs like the MP5,1.  I'd also check out the intriguingly named "GopCardEnabler" DXE driver from the new iMacPro bootrom.

I recently discovered that by injecting the CoreEG2 driver into the bootrom of a 2011 "UGA" iMac I was able to load AMD & Nvidia GOP EFIs from much newer machines that refuse to load without it!  It even gets debug LED 3 to light up, but sadly no boot-screens yet, the MXM cards I tested with have a multitude of other issues to fix first.  Anyway, I think there's a very good chance the same trick would work on the MP5,1.  I found you can also insert the EG2 driver directly into the video card ROM, combine it with the Vega EFI from the iMacPro and you might be in business...?   

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[DarthnVader]

Hi all, I can tell you the D300 EFI references both UGA & GOP GUIDs, but then so does every other AMD EFI I've checked,
as do multiple bootrom components of all intel Macs, even new ones that should have no business with UGA like the new iMacPro ?! 
Nvidia are all over the place to, older EFIs like the 8800 have both, but newer ones from the Kepler iMacs don't seem to reference either GUID ??

The repeating structure of the Turing roms is very odd, until someone verifies the actual EEPROM size I guess it could just be a bug in the dumping tool? or maybe some kind of dubious single chip bad-flash protection??  If you just hack out the EFI section UEFIromExtract will decompress it for you.  The 2070 EFI (v50006) looks very similar so no reason to think it won't have boot screens to, but if they're really going to dig their heels in over the CUDA issue then we might be waiting a long time for those drivers... 

I was just reading the thread over at MR, you guys should look into the "CoreEG2" DXE driver (4DDEAFA4-F480-4B9D-889B-1E3AE6605BD6) from the MP6,1 and newer iMac / Macbook bootroms.  It seems to be the base of the GOP console driver stack and serves a similar role on these machines to the Legacy VGA  / AGP driver (8A107CC5-DCDA-4FB7-A272-4243B41AFBFE) and VGA Bridge port driver (BC6D08DC-865D-4FFE-8B7A-FB5FB04F12F1) found on older UGA Macs like the MP5,1.  I'd also check out the intriguingly named "GopCardEnabler" DXE driver from the new iMacPro bootrom.

I recently discovered that by injecting the CoreEG2 driver into the bootrom of a 2011 "UGA" iMac I was able to load AMD & Nvidia GOP EFIs from much newer machines that refuse to load without it!  It even gets debug LED 3 to light up, but sadly no boot-screens yet, the MXM cards I tested with have a multitude of other issues to fix first.  Anyway, I think there's a very good chance the same trick would work on the MP5,1.  I found you can also insert the EG2 driver directly into the video card ROM, combine it with the Vega EFI from the iMacPro and you might be in business...?   

Interesting stuff, Nick, I did try to extract just the GOP driver from the 2080 rom, and run it through UEFIRomExtract, but it failed. Could be I did it wrong, so I'll try again.

How were you able to use the EG2 driver with another EFI Rom, I was thinking that only one EFI driver would work in an option ROM?

[forbiddenera]

2080gtx boot screen, not flashed, oob?

interesting

[Spacedust]

These cards are useless for Mac - no even able to boot Windows 7 in any mode with them.