Best graphics card upgrade for Mac Pro Mid-2010

sure...depends how you want to go. Usually, as you know, you'd try to find a mac compatible graphics card, of which there aren't a lot, there are some, just not a lot. Or you could try to find one that just happens to work with Mac, or get one that's been flashed to work with mac, eg macvidecards.com. I don't have any idea on how to flash a PC graphics card so that it works with mac, I'm just a user here, same as everyone else. For option A, Sapphire Radeon 7950 would be fine. I have one in my 2011 mac pro and it works fine. For option B, the R9 280X/390 series should work okay or nvidia GTX 970/980 and for Option C, you're on your own on that one.

well,. I tried, anyways

John B

Hi Jorge,

in my mac pro 2010 i have a gtx 980 ti running perfectly. Ask at http://www.macvidcards.com/ they have a great variety of low cost up to high end grafic cards. Their cards are already flashed for macintosh.

You can use (many, not all) unflashed cards too, but unflashed cards don´t show the boot screens where you can select between osx and windows. They only display when osx and grafic driver are loaded completely. In general, you dont need these screens, but in the case of problems it is very needfull you can see them.

My gtx 980 ti came with an adapter cable 6 pin motherboard to 8 pin grafic card. Both power cables must be attached.

At full power, the 980 ti needs some watt more than the motherboard officially can give, but in the 10 months i have it, it never crashed, even with some gpu hungry games on the Windows/Bootcamp side.

Greetings from germany

Chris

Why don´t you try the original amd driver for windows?

I did the same with my 980 ti on bootcamp. Works perfect!

One question: does your r9 280x show the boot screen, and when you press alt when booting, do you see the bootdisc selection screen?

greetings from germany

Chris

Do you use Apple Final Cut Pro X or Adobe Premier, Adobe After Effects, etc.

If you use Apple software then AMD video cards are the better choice, if you use Adobe software then Nvidia cards are better.

I believe the AMD R9 280x is the newest AMD card you can use in your Mac Pro at least for OS X at the moment, for Nvidia cards the GTX Titan X is still the top but most expensive model the next and more common choice is the GTX 980Ti. At the moment the newer GTX 1080 is not supported at all in OS X either with Apple's own driver or Nvidia's own driver. You can use newer cards in Windows via Boot Camp, to do this you need first to install Windows using an older video card that Apple's Boot Camp drivers support. After than you should be able to swap over to the newer card, let Windows boot and auto-detect the new card and auto-download the new drivers, you will not see anything on the screen until Windows has booted since the Mac side will not support the card. It should therefore be possible to use a GTX 1080 for example in Windows 10 via Boot Camp but not on the Mac side.

If your requirement was with a view to doing Virtual Reality, none of the virtual reality headsets support any model of Mac at least in Mac OS X despite the fact that in theory some models of Mac might be fast enough. This may change in the future but this along with gaming is an area the Mac is very poor at due to Apple's failure to keep Mac hardware up-to-date especially with regards to video cards. 😟 Since no current Mac has upgradeable hardware it is also something you cannot fix yourself in most cases.

I tried using AMD drivers for Bootcamp from there website, card not recognized, just generic windows drivers.

Had just tried the 980 Ti , even though its drivers worked. It contributed to video artifacts on my monitors and tested slower than 5770. I have 2 cinema displays one 30” and 23”. Also,with the 980 I can only have one Nvidia card installed at a time.

"One question: does your r9 280x show the boot screen"

Yes it does

Not sure what else I can do to get R9 to work in bootcamp windows7

Change to Windows 10?

When you update to windows 10, make a CLEAN REINSTALL.

On my mac pro 2010 i initially had severe problems with win 10. After a few days the windows file system always got corrupted so that it could not be repaired in any way. I always first installed win 7, installed bootcamp support drivers, then made the update to win 10.

Then after several tries i made a new and clean reinstall of win 7, NO BOOTCAMP SUPPORT drivers, then upgraded to win 10. And again NO bootcamp support drivers. For every system component i found a driver at the manufacturers web site. And after this win 10 works fast, stable, rock solid. There is no unknown device in the hardware manager.

And my 980ti works perfect too. Only display port cables longer than 2 meters will give me a screen blackout twice a week. Using cables with a maximum of 2 meter work perfect, no blackouts.

The screen artifacts you have ... your card must be defective. Or you dont have both power cables installed. The 980ti is power hungry, very very hungry.

The r9 280 drivers, did you get them here ... http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Radeon-200-Series-Drivers.asp x

greetings from germany

Chris

I just installed AMD R9 280x works fine and much faster than 5770 but will not work with bootcamp.

Runs with windows 7 generic drivers, slow.

Not sure what to do about it, any suggestions?

I have installed a AMD Radeon HD 7950 and while expensive, I am well pleased with it. It was a definite improvement over the card you have installed.

I don't think bootcamp install drivers are useful for the R9 card, they run the 5770 card not R9

I do use FCPX which now is much faster with R9