New driver brings Nvidia GeForce RTX to Hackintosh

A modern GeForce in a Mac – for Hackintosh enthusiasts, that had been a closed chapter for years. Nvidia released its last in-house drivers for macOS High Sierra; there was never one for cards from the Turing generation onward. Now a developer going by the name NullMoth has released a Metal driver on GitHub intended to fill precisely that gap: for the GeForce GTX 16 and RTX 20, 30, 40 and 50 series, as well as the Titan RTX and corresponding workstation cards.

The driver is intended for Intel Macs and PCs that boot macOS 15 Sequoia using OpenCore. Macs with Apple Silicon are excluded, as macOS does not support third-party graphics cards on those systems. The developer has tested the driver on a GeForce RTX 5060 under macOS 15.7 and 15.8.1, and users report that the RTX 5070 and RTX 5080 also work. It supports Metal 3, including ray tracing, mesh shaders and MetalFX, as well as OpenCL and Core ML.

The approach is intriguing. Rather than recreating an Nvidia driver, the project translates: Apple's intermediate shader code is converted into SPIR-V and then passed to NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver from the Mesa project. Nvidia's own open GPU kernel modules, adapted for macOS, run in the kernel. The result is less a conventional driver than a translation pipeline – making it all the more remarkable that it ultimately delivers a hardware-accelerated macOS desktop.

This is not a plug-and-play driver, however. It requires a working OpenCore setup, and installation involves disabling key macOS security mechanisms: System Integrity Protection is relaxed to allow unsigned kernel extensions to load, Apple's AMFI signature checks are bypassed using a boot argument, and Secure Boot is disabled. Then there is the pace of development. Only about a day and a half separated the first version on October 7 from version 1.1.0, with more than a dozen releases in between, many containing fixes for cards on which the desktop stayed black or Metal failed to start at all.

The project's source code is available, but it is not open source in the strict sense. All of the code is available, but the license prohibits any commercial use – personal, research and educational use is permitted. That means nobody is allowed to sell a ready-made Hackintosh with the driver preinstalled.

Isn't this arriving rather late? With macOS 26 Tahoe, Apple released the last version for Intel Macs; macOS 27 requires Apple Silicon. The driver targets Sequoia, one version further back, and the developer explicitly makes no claim of macOS 26 support. The first viable solution for modern GeForce cards thus arrives at the very moment when the Hackintosh as a whole is being phased out. Tiny Corp is taking a different approach: its driver connected an RTX 5090 to Apple Silicon Macs via Thunderbolt in the spring, albeit through the Tinygrad compiler and primarily for AI workloads.

Anyone running a Hackintosh with a GeForce card who enjoys experimenting will find the most exciting project in years here – on a secondary system, not their work machine. Everyone else can see it for what it is: proof that the silence between Nvidia and macOS was never a matter of technical limitations.