Boot Camp: How to get the latest NVIDIA drivers for your Mac

I’ve been running Windows XP on my 15” MacBook Pro for the past 2 months now to play PC games. Overall it’s been great fun to be able to play Windows only games, and my late 2008 unibody MacBook Pro is more than capable of playing the latest PC games.

The only issue I’ve run into is that the BootCamp installed graphics drivers are very old and perhaps not ideal for running the latest games… As Mac users this is one of the headaches we don’t normally have to worry about.

I’ve experimented with several drivers including 3rd party drivers before settling on the latest official driver from NVIDIA. The only hitch is that the NVIDIA installer “doesn’t support” Apple hardware, so here’s an easy work around you can use.

UPDATED 04-27-09 Thanks to the comments below from HJ.

Disclaimer: the described steps below worked for me, however I do not take responsibility for any damage done to your computer as a result of following my advice.

First you should uninstall your old Nvidia display driver from the add/remove control panel, (also a good idea to disable antivirus before doing this). DO NOT UN-INSTALL ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE NVIDIA DISPLAY DRIVER ONLY; if you do remove the other Nvidia drivers too you will have to reinstall the Boot Camp drivers from your Mac OS X install disc and start this process over. You will likely need to reboot after uninstalling.

  1. Check to see what graphics card you have; either in the Mac OS X “System Profiler” application under “Graphics/Displays”. My MacBook Pro has a GeForce 9600M GT (and the power saver 9400M).
  2. Download the latest NVIDIA driver for your graphics card. (At the time of this post the latest driver for my 9600M GT is 179.48). Note: If the installer auto runs cancel because we aren’t ready to install yet.
  3. Download the latest NVIDIA PhysX System Software. Note: Don’t install yet.
  4. To make the NVIDIA driver allow you to install it on your Apple hardware you need a modified INF file. Find the matching driver number on laptopvideo2go.com/enhancer. (Example: my driver 179.48). You are also able to modify driver settings on this page (see my external display post). Once finished this will download a file called NVAC.INF.
  5. Turn off all Antivirus software you are running after you scan the downloaded files. The antivirus may keep the driver install from correctly installing.
  6. Install the NVIDIA PhysX System Software. This should be quick and painless.
  7. Extract the NVIDIA driver you downloaded earlier to a new folder on your desktop or C:\NVIDIA.
  8. Locate the “Display” folder inside of the extracted NVIDIA driver folder and copy the NVAC.INF file into the ”Display” folder. It will ask you if you want to overwrite the existing file, press Yes.
  9. Run the Setup in the extracted NVIDIA driver folder. If it asks you if you want to overwrite files during the install press Yes.
  10. You should be done, restart and test your games.

On a side note you may want to checkout smcFanControl to make sure your Mac doesn’t overheat while running intense games. With this app you set your fans to a faster speed inside Mac OS before booting into Windows.

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