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Enabling Hardware Physics Acceleration on the New (and Old) MacBook Pro

October 24th, 2008

If you have a MacBook Pro with a GeForce 8-series or GeForce 9-series GPU and you’re using Apple’s stock Boot Camp-supplied NVIDIA drivers, then you’re missing out on hardware physics acceleration. I’m going to show you how to enable this feature.

Note

Before we start, let me just point out that I’m using a late 2008 MacBook Pro (with the GeForce 9600M GT GPU). The instructions here should work on the previous generation with the GeForce 8-series GPUs, but they’ll obviously have to be slightly modified (you’ll need to grab the lines specific to your hardware from Apple’s supplied NVIDIA driver INF file and use those instead later on).

Basic Idea

The basic idea I’m going to present here is that you grab the latest NVIDIA drivers from their site, modify them to allow installation on the MacBook Pro, and then install them — nothing spectacular, really.

The idea behind these instructions should also work with a Mac Pro, as long as you have a GeForce 8- or 9- series card. I don’t have a Mac Pro, so I can only speculate, but the latest NVIDIA drivers might already work without modification on the GeForce cards available for the system — in which case just install them, and you’ll be fine.

Background

Apple ships an outdated version of the NVIDIA GeForce drivers on the install disc included with the MacBook Pro — they’re a 176.XX release. Normally, this wouldn’t be that big a deal, but the latest NVIDIA drivers, dubbed Release 178, have this highlight listed:

Adds support for NVIDIA PhysX acceleration on all GeForce 8-series, 9-series and 200-series GPUs with a minimum of 256MB dedicated graphics memory (this driver package installs NVIDIA PhysX System Software v8.09.04)

The drivers that Apple ships don’t have this feature. Simple enough, then — right? Just upgrade to the latest NVIDIA driver.

Unfortunately, notebook users with ATI/NVIDIA graphics chips are usually in for a world of hurt when it comes to drivers, because both ATI and NVIDIA refuse to release official driver packages which support these mobile variations of their usual GPUs. Even though the driver itself will almost always work on the hardware, ATI and NVIDIA simply don’t add the required entries into the driver’s .INF files to allow them to be used with these mobile GPUs — something about how each notebook manufacturer likes to add “special features” and the like. cough Bullshit.

Fortunately, DriverHeaven.net stepped in a long time ago and developed a tool that they call the “Mobility Modder” that would take a set of ATI drivers and modify them, allowing them to be installed on notebooks with mobile ATI graphics. Due to popular demand, they’re now in the process of developing the NVIDIA equivalent of this tool — the second Public Beta was released on the 22nd of August.

However, Public Beta 2 of this tool doesn’t yet add the INF definitions for the Late 2008 MacBook Pro’s 9600M GT, so we’re going to have to do that ourselves. Let’s get to it …

Instructions

1. Go to nvidia.com and download the latest drivers for XP/Vista for the GeForce 8 or 9 series.

2. Double-click the driver archive and let it extract itself somewhere. I recommend something simple like C:\NVIDIA. Note that the driver will try to install itself after it extracts. It will fail. Don’t worry.

3. Download and install the NVIDIA Mobility Modder.

4. Run the above tool, and point it to your extracted NVIDIA driver folder.

   At this point, stop and give the drivers a go. Go into the extracted folder and double-click ’setup.exe’ — if they install fine, you’re done. If you get an error message about unsupported hardware, continue on to the next steps.

   At the time of this writing, the latest release of the NVIDIA Mobility Modder was Public Beta 2, and it did not support the late 2008 MacBook Pro. However, I contacted the developer and passed on the relevant information to him, and any release after Public Beta 2 should support the late 2008 MacBook Pro.**

5. Open nv4_disp.inf file in your favourite text editor.

6. Make the following additions:
   NOTE: These are for the 9600M GT in the late 2008 MacBook Pro ONLY. If you’ve got a previous-generation MacBook Pro with a GeForce 8-series GPU, these lines will be different. I’ll update this article in a bit and help you guys out.

   In the [NVIDIA.Mfg] section near the top …
   %NVIDIA_G96.DEV_0647.1% = nv4_NV3x_Mobile, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0647&SUBSYS_00B0106B %NVIDIA_G96.DEV_0647.2% = nv4_NV3x_Mobile, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0647&SUBSYS_00A9106B

   In the [Strings] section at the very bottom …
   NVIDIA_G96.DEV_0647.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT"
NVIDIA_G96.DEV_0647.2 = "NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT"

7. Save your file, and now double-click ’setup.exe’.

8. Reboot.

9. Confirm that you have PhysX hardware acceleration by going to Control Panel –> NVIDIA PhysX –> Settings tab. You should have the "GeForce PhysX" option enabled, and the radio button selected. (Obviously it’s disabled in the screenshot, but this is where you’re supposed to look.)

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!