In our article Apple Announce New Operating System At WWDC 2018 Called Mojave Apple announced that Mojave would be supported on Macs introduced in mid-2012 or later, plus 2010 and 2012 Mac Pro models as long as they had a recommended Metal-capable graphics cards. This triggered questions from a number of you like Karl Mainzer who asked: “Can you recommend a decent Metal compatible graphics card?” Once I started to research this it became clear it would be better to answer this with a dedicated article.

The first thing to be aware of is that neither of the stock graphics cards used in the cheese-graters, the Radeon 5770 or the Nvidia GeForce GT120 graphics cards are metal compatible. If you wish to use a Mid 2010 or Mid 2012 Mac Pro with macOS Mojave then you will need to upgrade your graphics card if you wish to run Mojave on your cheese-grater.

Which leads to the obvious question that Karl and a number of others have asked on social media. Which card should I upgrade to?

Since this article was written Apple has published a list of macOS Mojave supported graphics cards.

These specific third-party graphics cards are Metal-capable and compatible with macOS Mojave on Mac Pro (Mid 2010) and Mac Pro (Mid 2012):

• MSI Gaming Radeon RX 560 128-bit 4GB GDRR5

• SAPPHIRE Radeon PULSE RX 580 8GB GDDR5

• SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition

• NVIDIA Quadro K5000 for Mac

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition

Some other third-party graphics cards* based on the following AMD GPU families might also be compatible with macOS Mojave on Mac Pro (Mid 2010) and Mac Pro (Mid 2012):

• AMD Radeon RX 560

• AMD Radeon RX 570

• AMD Radeon RX 580

• AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100

• AMD Radeon RX Vega 56

• AMD Radeon RX Vega 64

• AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100

• AMD Radeon Frontier Edition 

If the graphics card in your Mac Pro isn't listed above, you need to install one that's compatible with macOS Mojave.

How Do I Check If My Graphics Card Is Supported?

To check to see if the graphics card in your Mac Pro is compatible, make sure you are on macOS High Sierra and then you can use System Information to find out which graphics card your Mac has:

1. Press and hold the Option key while choosing Apple () menu > System Information.

2. In the sidebar, select Graphics/Displays. If your graphics card is compatible, you see "Supported" next to the Metal entry. 

If it isn’t supported then look at one of the cards above that Apple approve.

As I have already upgraded my graphics card in my 2010 Mac Pro replacing the ATI Radeon HD5770 1024MB graphics card at the recommendation of UK based Create Pro with an AMD R9 280X 3GB card, which is an AMD 7xxx series card, with a custom flashed special Mac compatible ROM chip. I contacted their tech support and asked them whether my AMD R9 card was Metal compatible and the good news is that it is.

I then asked them for their advice for the situation with other possible cards and they confirmed that neither the ATI Radeon HD5770 and the Nvidia GeForce GT120 graphics card support Metal and so will not support macOS Mojave. Their recommendations are the AMD 5XX series and Nvidia 10XX series. However, they don’t know when Nvidia will release drivers for 10.14 yet so the AMD cards are the best bet as they will work out of the box and they have tested it successfully with the macOS Mojave 10.14 developer beta release.

Looking further afield for information on this Mac Rumours Mac Pro Metal Compatible Card thread there was confirmation of the AMD R9 280X 3GB card that I have as long as it has been flashed for use with a Mac. There are mixed views about the Nvidia GTX680 saying that the 680 Metal drivers are not good, especially with macOS High Sierra, and suggesting that the GeForce GTX TITAN X (Maxwell) or a GTX 1080 (Pascal) are OK with High Sierra,

On another Mac Rumours thread - Best Metal-compatible graphics card for MacPro5,1 (Mid 2010) running High Sierra question again confirmation of the AMD R9 280X 3GB card as well a recommendation to go with AMD cards rather than Nvidia as the AMD cards don’t need drivers.

In the same thread was a recommendation for the Sapphire RX 580 pulse 8gb as apparently, it is plug-and-play in High Sierra, but we have no confirmation of this.

Unfortunately, the AMD R9 280X 3GB card that I have got is no longer a current model but can be found on stores like Amazon and eBay for between £175 and £239 for a custom flashed version for the Mac Pro.

Create Pro is offering the following options for Graphics card updates for a Mac Pro 5,1…

• AMD Radeon RX560 with 4GB of memory - £215 plus taxes

• AMD Radeon RX560 with 8GB of memory - £295 plus taxes

• AMD Radeon Vega VII with 16GB of memory - £1,195 plus taxes

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti with 11GB of memory - £995 plus taxes

So a new AMD RX 560 4GB card looks a cost-effective solution if you want a new graphics card

Get A Mac Compatible Custom Flashed Card

We recommend that you make sure you get one that is a custom flashed Mac compatible version. If you don’t, it should still work, but not seeing the Apple boot screen etc, which could be an issue if you need to select a different startup disk or need to boot on single-user mode, or recovery mode because these things happen during the startup sequence and before the normal video drivers load. An unflashed PC graphics card won't display anything until the startup sequence is finished.

I hope that helps to answer the question about what macOS Metal compatible graphics card there are out there for Mac Pro 2010 and 2012 cheese-grater computers.

Whilst we are talking about macOS Mojave compatibility if you have any other Mac and you want to know about macOS Mojave compatibility then it would seem that these Macs that should be OK with Mojave are…

• MacBook (Early 2015 or later)

• MacBook Air (Mid-2012 or later)

• MacBook Pro (Mid-2012 or later)

• Mac mini (Late 2012 or later)

• iMac (Late 2012 or later)

• iMac Pro (all models)

• Mac Pro (Late 2013)

• Mac Pro (2010 or later with Metal-compatible GPU)

Because of the need for graphics cards that support Metal with Mojave, the list is even shorter than it was with macOS High Sierra and that rules out the Late 2009 MacBook, the Mid-2010 MacBook Pro, Late 2010 MacBook Air, Mid-2010 Mac mini, and Late 2009 iMac.