Abstract
Mar 17, 2008 This is a small guide on how to set up Natit for Radeon HD graphics cards in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.1 & 10.5.2). By following the steps below you will get full QE/CI/OpenGL and DVI output. I know there already is a guide but it is horribly outdated. It is actually a lot easier than you might think. Supported Radeon HD cards: Radeon HD 2600Pro.
After having had too much hazzle with the Gigabyte ATI x1650 (Device ID 71c6) I decided to buy a new graphics card. What made me buy that ATI (or in general an ATI card) again?
- Quartz Extreme 2D is mostly supported with ATI cards (see here how to do it)
- ATI mostly support natively h264 HD decoding
- Netkas wrote the driver :-)
- supports dual heading
- supports pivot
- supports sleep mode (Update 18.03.2008: sleep works with ASUS P5LD2 VM DH aswell. See here how to configure BIOS settings of ASUS P5LD2 VM DH)
- ATI Radeon HD 4670, ATI Radeon HD 4850, Radeon HD 4870'-Apple Specs page As far as I know, the ATI 2600 is NOT supported by openCL, which is odd, considering Apple was still shipping NEW macs with 2600's until March 2009, whereas the 8600M GT was introduced in summer 2007!
- For use with systems running Microsoft® Windows® 7 or 10 AND equipped with AMD Radeon™ graphics, AMD Radeon Pro graphics, or AMD processors with Radeon graphics. Download the Combined Chipset and Radeon Graphics driver installer and run.
- I have a early 2008 Mac Pro Quad-Core 2.66 with ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB dual DVI. I would like to update to a newer card and was wondering what is compatable with my machine. I have 12GB of ram and I do video editing and gaming on the off time.
- For use with systems running Microsoft® Windows® 7 or 10 AND equipped with AMD Radeon™ graphics, AMD Radeon Pro graphics, or AMD processors with Radeon graphics. Download the Combined Chipset and Radeon Graphics driver installer and run it directly onto the system you want to update.
Where to obtain
German users are provided with a link to Amazon.de where they can buy exactly the graphics card I used for the following howto. But in contrast to my fellow german users the american users cannot be provided with such a link, because Amazon.com doesn’t offer that card. Search it elsewhere or just order from the german Amazon store using this link: Sapphire RADEON HD 2600 XT PCIe ). This should be most hazzle-free way for you…
How to install(_t_h_e___h_a_z_z_l_e___f_r_e_e___w_a_y_)
Ok so, after having bought this new graphic card, don’t just install it yet into your tower or desktop. Instead boot your system into OS X while having your old graphics card installed. Follow those steps:
- Login into OS X as root.
- Get the new Netkas Natit Driver (link)
- install it to
/System/Library/Extensions/ - Make sure you set the right permissions to the
Natit.kext: open terminal and type:chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/Natit.kext - shutdown your system, unplug electricity and replace your graphics cards
- plug power chord and boot your system.
- you should be done…
Circumventing issues
If anything does not work and your screen looks garbled. I recommend having an XP or Vista installed on another drive and use MediaFour’s MacDrive 7. So you can download the driver again and copy to your OSX partition and install it manually in single user mode (provide -s at OSX boottime).
Sapphire ATI2600 XT 256MB
with HP w2207 (click to enlarge)
Final words
We hope you had some fun and we could provide you with some help here. If you are satisfied with this solution, you may consider our sponsors. They really got the coolest offers. Thanks :-)
Addendums for the german speaking community
Ati Radeon Hd 2600 Xt 256mb Driver Machine
Falls Ihr Fragen zu der Anleitung habt, bitte in die Kommentare. Wenn sich mehr als fünf deutschsprachige Leute melden, übersetze ich den Artikel. Ansonsten: wer exakt die Karte sucht, die ich verwendet habe, kauft bitte im deutschen Amazon Shop genau diese Karte hier: Sapphire RADEON HD 2600 XT PCIe 256 MB DDR3 128 Bit, Dual DVI, TV-Out, HDMI, OpenGL, DirectX10 Retail!!!