NullMoth Systems has released a free Metal driver that lets NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards run on macOS 15 Sequoia. It targets Intel Macs and PCs that boot macOS through OpenCore, which makes it a Hackintosh project at heart.
The NullMoth NVIDIA Driver for macOS sits on GitHub with roughly 2,000 stars and 181 forks. The full source code is included, and the developer says the driver is new and may not work on every PC.
The Driver Translates Metal Calls Into Vulkan for NVIDIA Cards
Apps talk to the card through a Metal driver plugin called NVMTLDriver.bundle. A shader translator converts Apple’s AIR shader code into SPIR-V, and that output goes to NVK, the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver, before reaching the GPU through four kernel extensions.
On the kernel side, the project runs NVIDIA’s own open GPU kernel modules, release 610, along with NVIDIA’s unmodified GSP firmware. The README lists Metal 3 features such as argument buffers tier 2, ray tracing, mesh shaders and Metal Performance Shaders, plus a MetalFX path. OpenGL, OpenCL, Core Image and Core ML also work through the driver.
Only the GeForce RTX 5060 Has Been Fully Tested So Far
The device table covers NVIDIA Turing and newer cards. That includes the GTX 16 series, RTX 20, RTX 30, RTX 40 and RTX 50 series, the TITAN RTX, and supported Quadro and RTX workstation cards, across 235 PCI device IDs.
The developer physically validated the driver on a GeForce RTX 5060 under macOS 15.7.x and 15.8.1, which is a much narrower list than the device table suggests. The support notes say the GeForce RTX 5070 and GeForce RTX 5080 are reported to work, while Turing, Ampere and Ada cards are still listed as pending validation.
Older Pascal, Maxwell and Kepler cards are outside the driver, since it relies on NVIDIA’s GSP firmware. Laptops are a weak spot too, because the driver does not implement an Optimus display mux. Apple silicon Macs are out entirely, as the driver is built for x86_64 only.
The README lists macOS 15 Sequoia as the only supported version. That narrows the window further, since Intel Macs cannot run macOS Golden Gate at all.
Installing It Means Loosening macOS Security Settings
You can either download the prebuilt package from the Releases page and run its install script, or use the 1401 Mac app, which finds the OpenCore partition that started your Mac, shows every change before making it and backs up the config. The app also adds a “Remove NVIDIA driver” entry to the OpenCore boot picker, and choosing it restores the Mac to its pre-install state.
Doing it by hand means wiring the driver into an existing OpenCore setup. The README calls for these changes:
- Above 4G Decoding turned on and CSM turned off in the BIOS
- SecureBootModel set to Disabled in OpenCore, because Apple Secure Boot refuses kernel extensions Apple did not sign
- A reduced System Integrity Protection value through csr-active-config, plus AMFI boot arguments so WindowServer can load the driver bundle
- An SMBIOS for a Mac that runs macOS 15 with a discrete GPU, such as iMacPro1,1
A reboot is required after installation, and macOS asks you to allow the extensions in System Settings the first time. The first start with the driver can pause for up to a minute at “PCI configuration end” while the GPU comes up.
The License Bans Commercial Use
The driver is free, but nobody may sell it or use it to make money. The plugin, kernel extensions and build scripts fall under the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license, which allows personal, research, educational and non-profit use.
Running macOS on non-Apple hardware also sits outside Apple’s license terms, a point that came up when a company launched a Hackintosh built on OpenCore. The shader translator is LGPL-3.0, based on metal2vulkan, and the Mesa changes are MIT licensed.
