Video card upgrade inspired by VW2017

[J. Wallace]

Hi all

A question for you, I'm running OSX 10.9.5 and just downloaded VW2017. It will not install on 10.9.5 so I need to upgrade to 10.10 or higher (at this point it looks like my only option is 10.11). For me this sets off a domino effect which brings my existing video card into question. I was looking the Saphire HD7950 as a replacement, not many cards are compatible with my older mac pro 5.1. Is anyone using this card or knows if VW works well with it?

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sapphire/100352MAC2/#owctabs

PS Looking forward to playing with this new version. Thanks

[Art V]

If you can afford to wait upgrading, you may want to do that as it seems that even a recent good video card may have display issues with the new display rendering in VW2017 when using the Best performance setting. Of course you could set the display from best performance to good performance but that sort of negates the advantage of the new display rendering if you have to do that with a recent video card.

It may be a bug in the display rendering or it could be that the new Best performance setting is so demanding you may want to keep that in mind for picking your next video card. So my suggestion for now is to wait until more info becomes available before making a decision on a new video card (if possible).

[PVA - Admin]

Well the problem with the older Macs is all the little workarounds needed to get 10.10 installed, basically spoofing OSX into thinking you have different hardware.

I've had a few users that did this have driver issues and strange glitching, and I don't know if they ever got it working properly. 

That GPU on its own seems to meet spec however, it's just a matter of if it would work or not in that Mac, there's no telling for sure until it's attemped  and that's expensive for old hardware.

[J. Wallace]

Thank you ArtV and Jim for your response.
Jim do you have any information on how older Mac pro's are doing with 10.11? I have done some searching on the web and it seems other than a few issues that it's compatible. I'm somewhat attached to my Macpro and hope to get 3-4 more years out of this,  after some upgrades.

Also I'm surprised that VW2017 requires an upgrade from OSX 10.9.5

[PVA - Admin]

No choice unfortunately, Apple splits off a version of Xcode for each OS release and if we wanted to support more than 10.11 and 10.10 we would have to maintain effectively a completely separate copy of the application, which is a lot of engineering overhead. 

Apple's hardware situation is not great at the moment, with pro users like you being left stuck on older hardware with your upgrade paths being less than ideal, the newest Mac Pro now being 3 years old and a lot of the iMac and most of the MacBook Pro range underpowered.

[Dave Donley]

Hi J. Wallace:

IMO $500 is too much to spend on a video card for an older machine.  VW runs very decently with a modern $150 gaming card, especially 2017.  If you want to run 2017 with that hardware you may indeed want to switch the Navigation Graphics preference to "Good Performance and Compatibility".  Newer hardware should work fine with 2017.  Also you should not assume you need to switch the Navigation Graphics pref right away, model size has a big impact on whether the video card and driver might misbehave. It might not have any problems with your hardware, but yes six years old is pretty old hardware.