An Unofficial NVIDIA macOS Driver Gets an RTX 5060 Running Metal 3 on Hackintosh PCs

Developer NullMoth published an unofficial NVIDIA macOS driver on GitHub that runs modern GeForce RTX cards as Metal devices under macOS 15 Sequoia, tested on an RTX 5060 with macOS 15.7.x. The driver translates Apple's AIR shader format to SPIR-V for Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver and uses NVIDIA's open r610 GPU kernel modules, supporting Metal 3, ray tracing, mesh shaders, MetalFX, OpenCL, Core Image and Core ML, with the GTX 16 series and RTX 20 through 50 series listed as targets. No benchmarks or verified game compatibility list exist yet, the stack is x86_64-only with no Apple Silicon or macOS 26 Tahoe support, and the PolyForm Noncommercial license bars commercial use such as selling prebuilt Hackintoshes.

No Apple Silicon, no benchmarks, and a SIP downgrade to get in the door, but GeForce cards are talking to macOS again for the first time in years. A developer working under the name NullMoth has published an unofficial NVIDIA macOS driver that lets modern GeForce RTX cards run as proper Metal devices under macOS 15 Sequoia. The project on GitHub https://github.com/nullmoth/nvidia-macos-driver was tested on an RTX 5060, and the README claims the card works "the way an Apple-supported GPU does", including the WindowServer desktop, Metal 3 workloads and hardware ray tracing. That last part matters. NVIDIA stopped shipping Mac web drivers back in the High Sierra era, and nothing from Turing onward has ever had an official macOS driver. For the Hackintosh crowd, the practical answer ever since Mojave has been simple: buy a Radeon. Tiny Corp has shown an RTX 5090 doing AI compute on Apple Silicon over Thunderbolt, but this is the first serious attempt to put a current GeForce behind the macOS desktop itself. How it actually works Rather than reverse-engineering a Metal driver from scratch, NullMoth built a translation stack out of existing open-source pieces. Apple compiles Metal shaders to an intermediate format called AIR; the driver converts that to SPIR-V, hands it to NVK, Mesa's open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware with its NAK shader compiler, and runs the kernel side on NVIDIA's own open GPU kernel modules the r610 branch , ported into macOS kernel extensions. The card boots on NVIDIA's stock, unmodified GSP firmware. The feature list on paper is broad. The README lists Metal 3 with tier-2 argument buffers, ray tracing, mesh shaders, Metal Performance Shaders and a MetalFX path, plus OpenCL, Core Image and Core ML, with OpenGL running through Apple's own GL-on-Metal layer. Up to four display heads are configured. Notebookcheck https://www.notebookcheck.net/New-driver-brings-Nvidia-GeForce-RTX-to-Hackintosh.1420428.0.html reports that the target list covers the GTX 16 series and RTX 20 through 50 series, and that users say the RTX 5070 and RTX 5080 also work. Officially, though, the only card the developer has tested is the RTX 5060, on macOS 15.7.x. The price of admission None of this is plug-and-play. You need a working OpenCore install, System Integrity Protection relaxed enough to load unsigned kexts, AMFI checks bypassed by boot argument, and Secure Boot turned off. The firmware side wants Above 4G Decoding on, CSM off and Resizable BAR configured; the README notes that an 8 GB BAR is what gives the RTX 5060 its full memory bandwidth. Apple Silicon is out entirely, since the stack is x86 64 only. It is also moving very fast. The first public release landed on October 7, and Notebookcheck counted more than a dozen releases in the day and a half before version 1.1.0, several of them fixing black screens or Metal failing to start on specific cards. The README itself warns that the driver "is new and may not work on every PC", and that the first boot can sit for up to a minute while the GPU initializes. What we still don't know Performance, mostly. There are no published benchmarks yet, and the Mac Observer https://www.macobserver.com/news/nvidia-rtx-5060-metal-apps-games-intel-mac-driver/ rightly points out that there is no verified game compatibility list either. A Metal-to-Vulkan hop adds translation work that a native driver would not need, so do not expect it to match the same card under Windows. Earlier development updates also listed no hardware video encode or decode, which pushes media playback onto the CPU. The timing is bittersweet, too. macOS 26 Tahoe is the last release that supports Intel Macs, and the driver makes no claim of Tahoe support today. The source is public, but the main components are licensed PolyForm Noncommercial, so this is free for personal, research and educational use and off-limits to anyone selling prebuilt Hackintoshes. Still, a current-generation GeForce driving a macOS desktop with ray tracing would have sounded like a joke a month ago. If you have a spare OpenCore box and an RTX card lying around, it is worth a weekend. Just do not put it on the machine you need on Monday.