Big Sur or Catalina on Mac Pro Late 2013

[nosajgames]

My daily drive MacBook pro 2016 is running Big Sur and my experimental 2017 MacBook Pro is running beta Monetary and my Mac Pro is still running Mojave. My only question is, has anyone had issues with Big Sur on the 2013 Macs? i've been holding off due to performance drawdowns as i do photo editing and music production right now; sometimes i get some lag here and there and for some reason when i leave iTunes playing my computer will randomly log me out and have me sign back in after 30mins of playing music when i'm not on it.

Point of this post is to get some feedback and i know it purely a decision upon myself but would love to hear everyones experience.

 

[jdb8167]

My daily drive MacBook pro 2016 is running Big Sur and my experimental 2017 MacBook Pro is running beta Monetary and my Mac Pro is still running Mojave. My only question is, has anyone had issues with Big Sur on the 2013 Macs? i've been holding off due to performance drawdowns as i do photo editing and music production right now; sometimes i get some lag here and there and for some reason when i leave iTunes playing my computer will randomly log me out and have me sign back in after 30mins of playing music when i'm not on it.

Point of this post is to get some feedback and i know it purely a decision upon myself but would love to hear everyones experience.

The only big issue I had was that SoftRAID wasn't available for a while but that has been resolved and it seems to run fine. I've been running Big Sur on my 2013 MP since the day it was released out of beta.

Configuration might matter though. Mine is a 6-core with 2 TB OWC SSD upgrade and 64 GB of RAM. And it is not my daily driver any longer. I've switched to using an M1 MacBook Air mostly with the MP as a NAS and a compute/VMWare server. But it is on 24/7 and hasn't had a single hiccup while running.

A small issue is that sometimes shutdown or restart seems to hang. But it did that in Catalina too. It might have something to do with my after-market SSD upgrade. Not a big problem since my uptime is usually measured in weeks.

 

[loby]

Big Sur runs good on Mac Pro 2013. The last update seemed to fix the SoftRAID issue I had. Also, seems to run cooler.

Note that if you update from Mojave, you will have firmware updates. The firmware updates seemed to be what makes Mac Pro run cooler as it seems to regulate the cores and gpus better. Mojave ran the cpu cores at full, where Big Sur seemed to cut them down, but with the combination of metal, Big Sur and cpu & gpu regulations (at least that I have seen in Final Cut), though it runs cooler and the cpus are not firing at full like before, I still get about the same performance. So to me it is a win for Mac Pro and Big Sur.