Mac Pro 2013 appears to not utilize both GPUs

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Mac Pro 2013 appears to not utilize both GPUs

Hi everyone,

I'm on a good old Mac Pro 2013, specs below. I have a dual monitor setup but in Activity Monitor have only ever seen activity register on one of the two GPUs. This doesn't seem right, and it seems like I may be taking a hit in picture quality, refresh rate, heat emitted, etc. Right now, for example, I'm running Pro Tools with its movie window filling up one monitor, and I have a video playing on Quicktime in the other. The Activity Monitor shows the level pegged in one GPU and non-existent in the other. This setup has been working great for the two years I've owned it—just never seen the second GPU show any activity.

Both monitors are Viewsonic model VX2478—left one horizontal, right one vertical. One is connected via the Mac's HDMI output to the monitor's HDMI input, the other via the middle-right Thunderbolt 2 port, through an adapter to HDMI, to the monitor's HDMI input.

Thank you for any ideas or information you can offer!

Jeremy

Mac Pro (Late 2013)

OS 10.14.6

2.7 GHz 12-core Intel Xeon E5

64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC (4 x 16 GB)

dual AMD FirePro D300 2GB graphics cards

dual Viewsonic VX2478 23.5-inch displays—one horizontal (2560x1440) & one vertical (1440x2560)

Mac Pro

Posted on Dec 2, 2021 5:40 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 3, 2021 7:03 AM in response to jjbullfrog

You could run the diagnostic, which should give a quick check to both.

You could try posting a new query with a title like, "any cheap applications use BOTH GPUs on a Mac Pro 2013?"

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Answer 2

jjbullfrog Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 2, 2021 10:00 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

So it sounds like this is (at least mostly) not a problem. Good to know.

Should I expect that any modern video game would be using both cards? Or if not, what's an example of something that qualifies as "high-performance graphics software?" And is there anything I can/must do to get something to take advantage of both cards, or will capable software just do it automatically?

I appreciate the answers! I wish this sort of information was better codified. Or maybe I'm just a terrible Googler...

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Answer 3

Dec 2, 2021 6:07 PM in response to jjbullfrog

<< it seems like I may be taking a hit in picture quality, refresh rate, heat emitted, etc. >>

You are not. You are getting everything it can give, and is loafing along.

ONE of your display cards has all six rasterizer/display-generator hardware. The other has none, by design.

Refreshing six displays of the specified sizes is not a challenge for this Hardware. In general, you set it up once and it refreshes the entire screen, then tells the processor it is done.

The second card is reserved for high performance GPU computations, without any interruptions, including no context-switching to service displays. But unless you are using high-performance graphics software that is aware of and uses the two cards together, the second card will be ignored.

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Mac Pro 2013 appears to not utilize both GPUs

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