video cards for older mac pro

Can anyone tell me which is the best video card to use with DaVinci studio16 to edit 4k and run fusion studio 16. I am running a mac pro mid-2010 with 12 processors and 16 GB of ram running high sierra (i know its a little old) but still works well. I know the newer video cards probably won't work but if someone could suggest an older card that will work well with my configuration I would appreciate it.
Thanks

One question you need to answer is: are you willing to modify your 5,1 to add power? If not you will be very limited in cards and may be better off with an external chassis to house the card(s).

Here is a related thread on the Mac Pro 5,1 with Dual GPU: viewtopic.php?t=94395

In summary, it looks like the Radeon VII might be a good choice. I hope to try mine in my old Mac Pro 5,1 when I have some time to rig up a power supply for it (and to buy a spare in case it blows up).

I still have one of those old mac pros and ended up going with a Sapphire Pulse RX580 8GB, works quite well but like a lot of these retrofits, there is no Mac OS boot screen. Re. the AMD Radeon VII, apparently requires a bit of hacking, see AMD Radeon VII on the Mac Pro 5,1.

In general, Mac Rumours Forum provides quite a lot of material and instructions for maintaining and upgrading these older mac pros. In particular, you may want to have a look at their extensive GPU Compatibility List for cMP.

thank you all for the info I will check out the links

I run an older Mac pro 3,1 with a Gtx 980 and 16Go of ram. Not all of them fit (double check the power required by the card) but it runs resolve 16 without any problems.

Same here with GTX 980 in Mac Pro 5,1. It works fine in Sierra but Resolve 16+ will need High Sierra onwards. There is no current support for GTX 980 (or most NVidia cards) in Mojave. Seems to me we have the option of sticking with GTX 980 and High Sierra (and hope BM do not up the requirements to Mojave+) or change to Radeon (AMD) card.
In the latter case, it seems to me that there are three groups of AMD cards:
1) Older top of the range gaming cards that need power mods to Mac Pro (not for me)
2) Older mid range cards that offer similar performance to 980 but compatibility with Mojave
3) New cards (RX 5700 range) that currently have limited support and very disappointing compute performance, but will hopefully improve later.

All in all it (for me) is definitely a 'wait and see' scenario.

my sapphire radeon VII works great in mojave at metall on my cMP 2010 with 16b6

I have an Asus Vega 64 connected to the external power supply in a Mac Pro 5.1 and it works just fine with Resolve 16B6 in OS10.14.5

Having 6x8 GB or 6x16 GB of RAM would be beneficial for Fusion.

Dejan: Can you be more specific? What do you mean by "the external power supply"? Did you route an external power supply into the 5,1 chassis to power the card? Could you include photos? I might go this route myself.
What power supply? Does it. power on with the main power or do you need to power it up first?

Mark: how did you power your VII?

I am using Titan X 12GB (Maxwell) cards in my three 5,1s.

As long as you have the proper 6 to 8 pin cables to power the card from the two logic board connectors, all should be well.

My Titans and 5,1s have been operating 5 days a week for the past 4 years with no problems.

If you go to www.barefeats.com you'll find tons of data for maximizing either the 2010-2012 or, 2013 Mac Pros.

And specifically for video cards in these machines, check out: http://www.macvidcards.com/

You'll find answers to all your questions in both places.

Mark: how did you power your VII?

with pixlas mode

https://thehouseofmoth.com/mac-pro-pixlas-mod/

Dejan: Can you be more specific? What do you mean by "the external power supply"? Did you route an external power supply into the 5,1 chassis to power the card? Could you include photos? I might go this route myself.
What power supply? Does it. power on with the main power or do you need to power it up first?

Yes, exactly. There is not much to it. Here is the photo.



There is a procedure called Pixlas Mod (google it) to actually power Vega 64 from internal power supply, but you need to order some wires and do some actual work to modify power wires inside computer.

What I did took all of a 10 minutes to go from RX580 to Vega 64 and continue working on actual editing project. It is not elegant, you need to turn on external power supply the same as you would fire up an eGPU box, but that's about it. Power supply is 650W, and it is modular, meaning you don't have all the unnecessary wires hanging around.

I have just checked on the latest 16.1 beta and see that as I feared the required Mac OS support has progressed to Mojave. This effectively means the end of Nvidia GPU with Resolve 16 on the Mac.
There are numerous sites trying to get Apple and Nvidia to resolve the issue but there seems to be little sign of any progress. It seems to me that it suits both companies to simply wave goodbye, but not admit such a strategy.
To some extent we have been reliant on inappropriate gaming GPU hardware working in a workstation platform. The marketing numbers are not there to have any confidence of continued support. At least I don't have the investment in the serious Nvidia GPU cards that cost £1000s!
As (now) an ex pro in retirement, I am not sure that I can justify the required investment in a replacement AMD card to continue with Resolve 16. I will happily continue using Resolve 15 and see what the future brings!

To update - I have bought a used RX 580 which has full Mojave (Metal) support and therefore allows me to use Resolve 16. The RX 580 (4GB) cost me 80UKP from Ebay and with a suitable power lead (£3 from Ebay) runs in the MacPro 5,1 without mods.
I guess 4K support in Resolve would be better with the 8GB version of the card but they are selling for considerably more.
FWIW

I came across this today:
https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commerc ... blockchain
curious to know if they would be a good solution for Resolve? The 16GB memory must be good?
I know nothing about coin mining but I guess it is just after compute power?
There are lots of ex mining cards coming onto Ebay - I guess the market has collapsed?
FWIW

I'm running 10.13.6 + all updates with 16.1.1 just fine with Titan X and nV drivers. It would be nice to move to 10.14.. or sort of 10.15 because there are some other updates I can't install with apple apps. Guess when the 2019 Mac Pro ships - they should call it the 2020 machine with less than 30 days left in the year by the time it ships - we'll find out if nV will be back on mac with new drivers and hardware, or its finally done for sure. its really bad apple / nV just won't be honest about there things are at so people can decide what the best move is.

hopefully there are drivers, and there already is a hack to get 10.15 onto the older machines. back to OP - hard to spend money on these machines given their age, but I'd put 32gb of ram in that machine. non-ECC ram will work fine, although preferably its all matched set. some folks have mixed ECC and non ECC but that wouldnt be my pic.

if you are on a budget, the Vega64 is a reasonable option.