New Graphics Support Discovered in OS X Lion: Sandy Bridge Intel Onboard, NVIDIA GeForce 5xx

Now that the cat is out of the bag, we can reveal some information about diverse new support for graphics in OS X Lion. The following graphics solutions have been reported as working. Please do not view this post as buying advice- all of this is experimental, and may or may not be stable.
While Intel's 2nd Generation Sandy Bridge onboard graphics solutions aren't powerful enough to be used for gaming, they do outperform older discreet cards such as the 8400 GS. In fact, Apple is using these chips in the latest Mac mini, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. We've personally confirmed HD 3000 from the Core i5-2500K working with full acceleration in OS X Lion.


These powerful next generation "Fermi" cards have initial support without any additional drivers in Lion. The NVDAGF100Hal.kext that is used for the Quadro and GeForce 4xx drivers is included by default. CUDA has to be installed separately, but has also been updated for 10.7. Although we haven't tested personally, these cards have been confirmed working in OS X Lion.

We're excited about all of this new functionality! If you have enabled full resolution and QE/CI acceleration, please share your experiences at the above threads in the forum. Good luck and have fun!

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