Why GTX 16 Series Cards Won’t Work in a Hackintosh (and What to Use Instead)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, 1660, 1660 Super, and 1660 Ti have zero macOS support. Learn why Turing fails, which workarounds don’t work, and which AMD cards to buy instead.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Super, and GTX 1660 Ti are entry-level Turing cards released between 2019 and 2020. They lack the ray tracing cores of the RTX 20 series but share the same TU117, TU116, and TU106 dies. For a Hackintosh builder, the first question is always driver support. The answer is unambiguous: no version of macOS, past or present, includes native drivers for this generation, and NVIDIA never released Web Drivers for Turing. Any attempt to use a GTX 16 series card as the primary display output in macOS will result in a black screen or a system that boots only to verbose text with no graphical interface.
Why the GTX 16 Series Fails on macOS
macOS’s GPU support has historically been limited to hardware for which Apple provides native drivers (e.g., Intel IGPs, AMD Radeon, and older NVIDIA Kepler) or to hardware for which NVIDIA shipped third-party Web Drivers (Maxwell and Pascal up to macOS High Sierra 10.13.6). The Turing microarchitecture, introduced in 2018, was never adopted in any Mac model. Apple moved exclusively to AMD graphics after the 2013 Mac Pro. Consequently, the IOKit family for NVIDIA in macOS stopped at the ‘NVDAStartup’ kext version supporting GPUs up to GP10x (Pascal). Turing requires a different GPU family ID (0x1E, 0x1F) that the macOS driver stack does not recognize. Injecting device-IDs or spoofing ACPI tables cannot force the old drivers to initialize the new hardware—the firmware handshake fails at the PCI configuration space level.
List of NVIDIA GeForce 16 Series Cards
| Model | Core | Memory | Release | macOS support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GTX 1650 (GDDR5/GDDR6) | TU117 | 4 GB | Q2 2019 | None |
| GTX 1650 Super | TU116 | 4 GB | Q4 2019 | None |
| GTX 1660 | TU116 | 6 GB | Q1 2019 | None |
| GTX 1660 Super | TU116 | 6 GB | Q4 2019 | None |
| GTX 1660 Ti | TU116 | 6 GB | Q1 2019 | None |
All entries above are binary-incompatible with macOS. Even the most lenient method—forcing Acceleration with the ‘-wegnoegpu’ boot argument and relying solely on software render—produces unusable performance. The system will boot to the desktop with no CI/Core Image and resolutions limited to 1024×768.
Attempted Workarounds and Their Failure Points
Some documentation on legacy forums suggests spoofing the device ID of a GTX 16 card to a Pascal ID (e.g., 0x1B80 or 0x1C02) in the device properties section of the OpenCore or Clover config.plist. While the system may then load the NVIDIA Web Driver, the driver’s internal firmware checks detect the real hardware version and either panic or display a black screen. Injecting a fake board-ID in the ‘@0,compatible’ property does not bypass the GPU’s VBIOS mismatch. There is no publicly known ACPI SSDT patch that can make a Turing card reply to the G80-style mailbox commands used by macOS.
What About the Web Driver for High Sierra?
The final NVIDIA Web Driver release (version 387.10.10.10.40.140) dated January 2020, but it targets macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G14042). Extensive testing by the community confirms that this driver does not contain code for TU117 or TU116. It includes families NVDAFamily, GeForce, and NVDAStartup kexts with plists covering device IDs from 0x0FC0 (GT 640) up to 0x1C03 (GTX 1080 Ti). No Turing ID appears in the plist. Users who try to add their own device ID to Info.plist will find that the driver kernel extension fails to allocate a firmware context, resulting in a kernel panic at ‘nvdaStartup’. This is not a matter of configuration—the fundamental GPU microarchitecture is not supported.
Practical Alternatives for a Hackintosh with GTX 16 Hardware
If you already own a GTX 16 card and wish to build a macOS system, the only viable path is a dual-boot configuration. The card will function properly under Windows or Linux but must be replaced or supplemented for macOS. The most cost-effective AMD options that work out of the box with macOS Mojave through Ventura include:
- AMD Radeon RX 580 (Polaris) – 8 GB, full acceleration
- AMD Radeon RX 590 – same architecture, slightly higher clock
- AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT – Navi 14, low power
- AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT – Navi 10, more demanding power supply
All these cards have native support via AMDRadeonX6000.kext or AMDRadeonX5000.kext. For older macOS versions (High Sierra and earlier), a Kepler-based NVIDIA card (GT 640, GTX 650, GTX 680, Quadro K2000) is still the most reliable choice, and detailed injection methods are covered in the Hardware and PCI Devices Guide for macOS 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard) Hackintosh for those working with legacy builds.
Checking Compatibility Before You Buy
Before purchasing any GPU for a Hackintosh, verify the model number against the ‘GPU buyers guide’ maintained by the community (e.g., the ‘macOS GPU Compatibility’ table on the Dortania OpenCore Install Guide). Cross-reference the Device ID from the GPU’s technical specifications. For NVIDIA, only Kepler (5xx/6xx/7xx) and some early Maxwell (GTX 750, GTX 950, GTX 960) have any degree of native support; Pascal requires Web Drivers limited to High Sierra; Turing, Ampere, and newer have no support. The GTX 16 series falls squarely into the unsupported category. If you intend to run macOS as a primary or even secondary OS, choosing an AMD card or integrating Intel IGPUs avoids years of frustration.
As a final caution: never attempt to flash a modified VBIOS onto a GTX 16 card in hopes of making it macOS-compatible. Such modifications carry a risk of bricking the card and voiding any warranty. Back up your original firmware before any experiment, and recognize that even successful reflashes have never yielded a working macOS driver init. The architecture limitation is at the driver layer, not the firmware layer.
