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Inexpensive GPU for SST 4K at 60Hz running FCPX.

crystalidea said:
@h9826790
flashed MSI R9 280x will never boot with 4k monitor connected?
Is there a metal capable GPU that
- boots with 4k60hz without a problem
- has boot screens
Maybe AMD Sapphire Radeon HD7950 3GB GDDR5?

Thank you.
Click to expand...

No, there is nothing that meets all of those criteria. Until Mojave the only workable solution was to buy a Maxwell-based NVIDIA card flashed by MacVidCards. That enabled 4K@60Hz booting with boot screens, but the downside was having to install NVIDIA web drivers with every single major and minor update to macOS.

But with Mojave, NVIDIA web drivers aren't available (and appears increasingly likely they will never be), so suffice it to say that there is no card you can get for Mojave (i.e. Metal-capable) that will show boot screens AND will boot with a 4K @ 60Hz (i.e. connected via DP 1.2).

So you will have to make some compromise:

1. Give up on Mojave and stay with High Sierra or earlier. In this case you can get boot screens and 4K@60Hz booting with a MacVidCards-flashed Maxwell card and NVIDIA web drivers.

2. Use an older Radeon 7950 "Mac Edition" or its variants (or Nvidia GTX 680 "Mac Edition" or its variants), and get Mojave and boot screens, but not on a 4K monitor connected via DP 1.2. You can set the monitor to DP 1.1 mode and run in 4K @ 30Hz, or connect via HDMI or DVI (neither of which will run 4K @ 60Hz), or connect a non-4K monitor to use for booting and then connect your 4K DP1.2 monitor after booting.

3. Run Mojave and boot in glorious 4K @ 60Hz but give in to the dark side of no boot screens. This is what Apple intends for you to do, so they have "helpfully" disabled FileVault from being enabled on the cMP, regardless of what GPU you are using.

In the end I chose option 3--no regrets. Good luck in your decision-making!
 
bookemdano said:
No, there is nothing that meets all of those criteria. Until Mojave the only workable solution was to buy a Maxwell-based NVIDIA card flashed by MacVidCards. That enabled 4K@60Hz booting with boot screens, but the downside was having to install NVIDIA web drivers with every single major and minor update to macOS.

But with Mojave, NVIDIA web drivers aren't available (and appears increasingly likely they will never be), so suffice it to say that there is no card you can get for Mojave (i.e. Metal-capable) that will show boot screens AND will boot with a 4K @ 60Hz (i.e. connected via DP 1.2).

So you will have to make some compromise:

1. Give up on Mojave and stay with High Sierra or earlier. In this case you can get boot screens and 4K@60Hz booting with a MacVidCards-flashed Maxwell card and NVIDIA web drivers.

2. Use an older Radeon 7950 "Mac Edition" or its variants (or Nvidia GTX 680 "Mac Edition" or its variants), and get Mojave and boot screens, but not on a 4K monitor connected via DP 1.2. You can set the monitor to DP 1.1 mode and run in 4K @ 30Hz, or connect via HDMI or DVI (neither of which will run 4K @ 60Hz), or connect a non-4K monitor to use for booting and then connect your 4K DP1.2 monitor after booting.

3. Run Mojave and boot in glorious 4K @ 60Hz but give in to the dark side of no boot screens. This is what Apple intends for you to do, so they have "helpfully" disabled FileVault from being enabled on the cMP, regardless of what GPU you are using.

In the end I chose option 3--no regrets. Good luck in your decision-making!
Click to expand...

According to this user the Titan can display 4k with 60Hz on the display port, and I read some reports that even HDMI 1.4 somehow outputs 60Hz 4K
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/one-gtx-titan-multi-4k-monitors.2581719/
 
startergo said:
According to this user the Titan can display 4k with 60Hz on the display port, and I read some reports that even HDMI 1.4 somehow outputs 60Hz 4K
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/one-gtx-titan-multi-4k-monitors.2581719/
Click to expand...

Unless you can find a thread talking about cards in relation to the cMP, any other discussions are pretty much irrelevant to the situation on the cMP. Most cards can display 4K @ 60Hz on the cMP just fine, and most cards will boot just fine connected to a 4K @ 60Hz display. But on cards flashed with the EFI ROM to display boot screens on the cMP, booting is impossible with a 4K @ 60Hz display connected--the cMP just freezes up and never loads the OS. This has been a long-running problem and had many threads here posted about it over the years. I suffered with the issue for half a year before I broke down and bought an MVC-flashed 750Ti to solve the problem. But then along came Mojave. The situation sucks, but I've resigned myself to life without boot screens. It's not that bad.

Apparently NVIDIA did some trickery (i.e. chroma subsampling) to enable 4K @ 60Hz on Kepler cards via their driver. But I think that was only on Windows. Maybe someone who has a Titan or other Kepler card on their cMP can confirm if they can choose 60Hz with an HDMI connection. I highly doubt it is possible as Kepler cards have been on the market for years now and there have been no reports of success I have seen of cMP users getting 4K @ 60Hz on an HDMI 1.4 connection. Would love to be proven wrong though.
 
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@bookemdano

Thanks a lot for the most detailed and helpful explanation. I'll take the option 2, because I need Windows (boot screen is required to load into Windows, right?) & Mojave to test the software
 
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crystalidea said:
@bookemdano

Thanks a lot for the most detailed and helpful explanation. I'll take the option 2, because I need Windows (boot screen is required to load into Windows, right?) & Mojave to test the software
Click to expand...

No actually, boot screens are not needed in order to switch back and forth between Windows and Mojave! h98 wrote up a great tutorial here: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ut-a-boot-screen.2114788/page-9#post-26689280

As long as you're willing to dedicate a separate drive (SATA, can't be NVMe) to Windows 10 (which on the Mac Pro you should be doing anyway), then the instructions in that post will get you seamless switching between Mojave (using System Preferences > Startup Disk) and Windows 10 (using Boot Camp Control Panel). Many of us (including myself) have been running that way for months with great success.

Granted, having the boot picker is arguably more convenient, but it's also nice to be able to run a modern GPU. The 7950 and GTX 680 are pretty old tech by now.
 
It's perfectly possible to have a Win10 install on the same drive as macOS and freely boot between them in the manner you describe. The only key thing is to be running the Bootcamp 6,1 package in Windows, so the control panel there will let you reboot into macOS.

I did this for months with Mojave and non-EFI Windows 10, on a Mac Pro 5,1. I eventually used separate drives, but only because I wanted an NVMe drive for macOS and Bootcamp won't work on that (and wanted more space anyway).

Btw, I only paid £150 for my RX580 Pulse, mint, boxed second-hand on eBay. I don't have a 4K monitor, but obviously it would drive it fine. No boot screens, but in all other respects it's a good card. The RX570 should be fine for your needs, though, and would save a bit of cash.
 
Last edited:
mode11 said:
It's perfectly possible to have a Win10 install on the same drive as macOS and freely boot between them in the manner you describe. The only key thing is to be running the Bootcamp 6,1 package in Windows, so the control panel there will let you reboot into macOS.

I did this for months with Mojave and non-EFI Windows 10, on a Mac Pro 5,1. I eventually used separate drives, but only because I wanted an NVMe drive for macOS and Bootcamp won't work on that (and wanted more space anyway).

Btw, I only paid £150 for my RX580 Pulse, mint, boxed second-hand on eBay. I don't have a 4K monitor, but obviously it would drive it fine. No boot screens, but in all other respects it's a good card. The RX570 should be fine for your needs, though, and would save a bit of cash.
Click to expand...

I specified separate drives because that is what the tutorial presumes. Normally, to get Windows on the same drive as macOS you use Boot Camp Assistant to properly partition the drive. But Boot Camp Assistant has been blocked by Apple from running on the cMP under Mojave.

While I'm sure there are ways to do the partitioning manually, in this day and age with cheap storage (and the cMP's plentiful number of storage connections) it simply no longer makes practical sense (and needlessly complicates the Windows install--potentially endangering your data) to try to split a single drive between macOS and Windows on this platform.
 
Didn't realise Mojave Bootcamp Assistant wasn't allowing fresh installs on a cMP. I've had the same BC for years, just transferring it between drives / partitions using WinClone. I agree that SSDs are cheap these days and using separate drives is simpler / safer when installing Windows. But it's worth noting that it is possible to run BC reliably on the boot disk, if that's desirable / necessary for the user.
 
crystalidea said:
Last question, just curious. And this one? Does it support boot screen + booting 60hz 4k ?

PS. Probably NO.
Click to expand...

Nope, sorry. That's the card that all the other bootscreen-displaying AMD cards got their "special sauce" from. They all use the EFI ROM from that card, which does not boot when connected via DP 1.2 to a 4K monitor. Sorry :(
 
iv not done 4K 60fps only 4K 24/25/30fps H264 from my GX85 with davinci resolve, i got a used RX 580 8GB (£120~ UK used when i got mine) and it seems to work well for me.
i can maintain full frame rate with light grading, it's not till i have a few nodes layered up that i start to see some lost frames.
a massive speed up over my old GTX770 4GB and i dont get 'low vram' crashes all the time when i work with 4K video.

the next step up is a vega 56 (dont get a big OC one as power is a thing, research needed).

if you need CUDA im tempted to say boot windows :p
look at OSX10.13.6 and gtx1080 (not sure what GTX10XX cards work best of hand)
but with nvidia we have no idea if there will be support past osx10.13 so if thats something you can live with it's a good option.

i dont have boot display but the card dose have two DP ports for 4K out
also there's options like black magic decklink that may be an option
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/decklink

o for 4K try to look at cards with more than 4GB vram, but it can relay depend on the app and render options CUDA/openCL/metal etc
 
bookemdano said:
Unless you can find a thread talking about cards in relation to the cMP, any other discussions are pretty much irrelevant to the situation on the cMP. Most cards can display 4K @ 60Hz on the cMP just fine, and most cards will boot just fine connected to a 4K @ 60Hz display. But on cards flashed with the EFI ROM to display boot screens on the cMP, booting is impossible with a 4K @ 60Hz display connected--the cMP just freezes up and never loads the OS. This has been a long-running problem and had many threads here posted about it over the years. I suffered with the issue for half a year before I broke down and bought an MVC-flashed 750Ti to solve the problem. But then along came Mojave. The situation sucks, but I've resigned myself to life without boot screens. It's not that bad.

Apparently NVIDIA did some trickery (i.e. chroma subsampling) to enable 4K @ 60Hz on Kepler cards via their driver. But I think that was only on Windows. Maybe someone who has a Titan or other Kepler card on their cMP can confirm if they can choose 60Hz with an HDMI connection. I highly doubt it is possible as Kepler cards have been on the market for years now and there have been no reports of success I have seen of cMP users getting 4K @ 60Hz on an HDMI 1.4 connection. Would love to be proven wrong though.
Click to expand...

Problem: the monitor doesn't wake up from sleep mode automatically when Mojave is loaded 4k60hz. I have to press buttons on the monitor (or turn it off/on), then it's OK. I have a non-flashed MSI R9 280X connected to Dell P2715Q 4k monitor via MinidisplayPort -> DisplayPort cable
 
crystalidea said:
Problem: the monitor doesn't wake up from sleep mode automatically when Mojave is loaded 4k60hz. I have to press buttons on the monitor (or turn it off/on), then it's OK. I have a non-flashed MSI R9 280X connected to Dell P2715Q 4k monitor via MinidisplayPort -> DisplayPort cable
Click to expand...

Known issue with early versions of the P2715Q. Check this thread (and many others if you google P2715Q wake sleep):

https://www.dell.com/community/Moni...ake-from-sleep-from-power-saving/td-p/4672198
 
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