Video Card - Mac Pro High Sierra & Native

[Siegfried Meier]

Hey guys,

Would love opinions on what card you guys are recommending with High Sierra and PT Ultimate 2018.4 Native. The stock card in our Mac Pro 5,1 2012 is no longer cutting it.

I've got the Sapphire HD 7950 in mind that OWC sells - it has 3072 MB of VRAM.

Would love to hear some thoughts!
Thanks,
Sig

[Mount Royal]

Originally Posted by Siegfried Meier

Hey guys,

Would love opinions on what card you guys are recommending with High Sierra and PT Ultimate 2018.4 Native. The stock card in our Mac Pro 5,1 2012 is no longer cutting it.

I've got the Sapphire HD 7950 in mind that OWC sells - it has 3072 MB of VRAM.

Would love to hear some thoughts!
Thanks,
Sig

I trust you have the ATI Radeon HD 5770 card in the 5,1 MacPro. In what way is that card not working in High Sierra and 2018.4?

I thought that, on paper at least, the 5,1 MacPro was not suited for High Sierra. My teaching was that the 5,1 stopped at Sierra. No? Is it possible that your difficulties aren't traceable to the video card, but to an OS incompatibility? Asking out of ignorance.

John Caldwell

[peterle]

mac pro 5.1 is high sierra compatible (even an 4.1 flashed to 5.1)
..a 5770 card should do the job , also 5870

[DetroitT]

Hi.
I'm running HDX card (Power need)

Been using the Sapphire Mac edition with 3 displays.
HS MacOS 10.13.xx and Pro Tools have issue with Window configurations.
That said HDX Power required a PCIe power cable mod.
This again has been working fine until recent. Showing it's age I have tried a few variations.
1. MacVideoCards GTX 1080 8GB (Mac power draw for my system) worked great but initial Fan ramp-up
and expanding into larger SSD and spinner drives kept my search going.
2. AMD WX7100 (Ideal power draw and 6 pin)
No-one flashing WX and Apple Drivers put it as and external GPU.
Pain with too many ktext mods to wrangle.
3. my current solution is a NVIDIA P4000 (6 pin 105 watts) and a GTX 120 Mac card for boot EFI
Not as drawing in power (Even as 2 single slot) works nicely with 4K and 3 displays.
Pro Tools Window configs holds most but some like colors, Transport, System Usage floating windows do not hold there place.

In general I'm at the best yet.

In retrospect the flashed MVC GTX 1070 might have been a single, dual slot lowish power solution.

Depending on your graphic and PCIe Power needs the Sapphire Mac Edition is a great card/price.
I don't recommend the older GTX 680 Mac Edition (2 of 2 failed at a studio I service)

[Siegfried Meier]

Is this the same card as I was referring to from OWC?

Thanks!!
Sig

Originally Posted by DetroitT

Hi.
I'm running HDX card (Power need)

Been using the Sapphire Mac edition with 3 displays.
HS MacOS 10.13.xx and Pro Tools have issue with Window configurations.
That said HDX Power required a PCIe power cable mod.
This again has been working fine until recent. Showing it's age I have tried a few variations.
1. MacVideoCards GTX 1080 8GB (Mac power draw for my system) worked great but initial Fan ramp-up
and expanding into larger SSD and spinner drives kept my search going.
2. AMD WX7100 (Ideal power draw and 6 pin)
No-one flashing WX and Apple Drivers put it as and external GPU.
Pain with too many ktext mods to wrangle.
3. my current solution is a NVIDIA P4000 (6 pin 105 watts) and a GTX 120 Mac card for boot EFI
Not as drawing in power (Even as 2 single slot) works nicely with 4K and 3 displays.
Pro Tools Window configs holds most but some like colors, Transport, System Usage floating windows do not hold there place.

In general I'm at the best yet.

In retrospect the flashed MVC GTX 1070 might have been a single, dual slot lowish power solution.

Depending on your graphic and PCIe Power needs the Sapphire Mac Edition is a great card/price.
I don't recommend the older GTX 680 Mac Edition (2 of 2 failed at a studio I service)

[DetroitT]

Yes. A nice card. It has a small efi switch for mac or win systems.
It requires 2 six pin pci power connects which come with it and the mac handles well.

PS Being a Radeon Graphic Card, all mac drivers are native.

[Siegfried Meier]

Alright gang, I splurged on this video card and it cost me a fortune…and it does NOTHING for my issues.

Whoever said the sluggishness is related to video ram, is totally clueless and out to lunch.

Hey listen, I'm not asking for much here. When I cut and edit drums, I want the speed of waveforms, moving and zooming to feel like it did on Mountain Lion and Pro Tools 10HD. What's it take to get this on Sierra and PT2018 Ultimate now?

This has been garbage since PT12. The machine has 32G of RAM and screams in ML and PT10HD…why can't we make this work the way it's ALREADY WORKED IN THE PAST!?

Is there a site that will help me optimize Sierra for Pro Tools? Never needed to do that in the past 20 years of using OSX, but hey these releases are getting worse and worse every year. Pulling my hair out with this guys…is AVID's code just that garbage and there's nothing that will make it feel like it used to? Cause if that's the case, I'm not interested in throwing any more money at AVID.

Any thoughts or hints much appreciated here…and if you tell me that Pro Tools now needs 128G of RAM, I'm heading back to OS9.

[DetroitT]

What are your actual specs here.
Pro Tools version number?
OS version number?
We assume you using a Mac edition 7950 video card.
(can be returned correct)

HD Native
original 5,1 MacPro MHz and Cores
32 GB Ram 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC
SSD's? Trim tuned on?

[Siegfried Meier]

PCIe SSD drives, other internal SSD drives (makes no difference).

Latest version of Sierra (tried High Sierra too, even more garbage).

Pro Tools Ultimate 2018.7

What does “trim tuned on” mean?

Thanks,
Sig

[s.d. finley]

I think SSD Trim was needed in older Mac OS's like Lion and such. El Crap and above doesn't need it.