dissonance8 wrote:
Hmm okay, thanks for the info. I will do more research about this flash thing.
By the way, my friend said that running bootcamp with bottleneck the CPU and severely limit the potential of a GPU like the new cards like GTX 1080 or 980, etc, and I will get only a fraction of the power of the GPU's potential, even if I'm on Windows OS, albeit via bootcamp. Is this true?
Your friend is (mostly) wrong.
If you are running Windows via Boot Camp you are running Windows natively just like on a real PC. It will therefore be as fast as a real PC. In fact on many occasions people have found it faster than a fresh out of the box real PC because it will not be stuffed full of 'bloatware'.
The issues that would these days make a classic Mac Pro running Windows via Boot Camp slower than a new real PC are the fact that the Mac Pro is of course old - the last classic Mac Pro dates from 2012, and hence it will have slower CPU chips, slower RAM, and a slower PCIe slot. The classic Mac Pro 2010 and 2012 have PCIe 2.0 slots with 16 lanes. The new PCs would now have PCIe 3.0. This however does not make as big a difference as you might think.
Your friend may be getting confused with the possibility to run Windows via in a virtual machine on a Mac using either VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. These in the later versions do provide some video acceleration to the copy of Windows in the VM but no-where near as fast as running Windows directly. However as I said Boot Camp means you are running Windows directly (natively) so this does not apply.
Since Windows does support a GTX 1080 card you could fit such a card in a classic Mac Pro, use Boot Camp to run Windows 10, and it will work. You will not see anything on screen until Windows has finished booting, this is where having a video card 'flashed' to include Mac compatible firmware is needed. However this does not prevent it booting, it merely means you do not see anything until booting has finished and the driver has been loaded.
Note: The GTX 1080 does not yet have any Mac drivers, the current best card with Mac drivers is the GTX 980Ti. MacVidCards can 'flash' the 980 and 980Ti to include Mac firmware, the drivers are standard (Mac) drivers direct from Nvidia.