ATI Displays on a Mac Pro any Intel Mac?

Note: Stop right here if you're not comfortable with the terminal. If you're just going to copy and paste what you see, you're doomed to failure.

Background

The ATI Displays panel is a tool from ATI that enables users to tweak some OpenGL pixel format and texture options that otherwise couldn't be touched in OS X. ATI is pretty bad about not getting new versions out for OEM cards, so poor sods that own Apple Mac Pros with the X1900 XT have been stuck outside.

There were hacks that could get antialiasing working, but they were fairly cumbersome. You can use the OpenGL Profiler to alter the pixel format of something, and launch it from that.

But then..

Lucky for us, on November 6, ATI Released a G5 X1900 Card. (We can still feel better because theirs is only 256MB). It turns out it included ATI Displays 4.5.9, (4.5.7 is the last thing they have officially released) which is Universal and it loaded right up on my Mac Pro. Everything works.

Yay, look!

It detects everything just fine:
Screenshot of utility.
And it works (yes, I did test it to make sure it actually applies):
Screenshot of utility.

Another cool thing is that you can force on VSync in this panel and Quake 4, Doom 3, and Prey will all stop tearing on the X1900 (previously the setting in-game didn't change anything.)

Instructions

  1. Download the latest X1900 G5 driver from ATI.

  2. Now we need to trick the installer into thinking we have a PowerMac G5. The installer will use sysctl to check the hw.model attribute. We are just going to temporarily replace the sysctl binary with something that always outputs what we want. Copy it somewhere safe.

    $ sudo cp /usr/sbin/sysctl /usr/sbin/sysctl.real

  3. Replace sysctl with a file with this in it:

    #!/bin/sh
echo "PowerMac11,2"

  4. Make it executable:

    $ sudo chmod +x /usr/sbin/sysctl

  5. Run the installer just like anyone would.

  6. Put the real sysctl back:

    $ sudo mv /usr/sbin/sysctl.real /usr/sbin/sysctl

Everything should Just Work. I've only tested this on a 2006 Mac Pro with 10.4.10 and 10.5.1 If you can confirm it works on a different Intel Mac, let me know.