MP 1,1-5,1 GPU compatible with Snow Leopard (10.6.8) AND Monterey/Ventura/Sonoma?

[twotone]

Hi folks,

I'm intending to have a dual boot arrangement on a 5,1 (upgraded from 4,1) to run Snow Leopard 10.6.8 in order to use various older hardware (and power PC applications supported by the inbuilt Rosetta), and then on a separate SSD an OS such as Monterey/Ventura/Sonoma.

However, as this machine once upgraded to e.g. dual 3.46ghz processors and 96GB Ram will be very usable, I'd like to use it for more 'modern' stuff too, including a bit of video editing to give my M1 Mini a break.

After doing some late night reading some helpful comments, I've realised the stumbling block will be getting a GPU that will be compatible for both.

Is there a GPU that will work for both Snow Leopard AND Monterey/Ventura/Sonoma? I appreciate I'm trying to bridge compatibility over 15+ years of releases here, so if that's not possible, what is the latest OS and GPU that would be compatible?

Thank you!

 

[Macschrauber]

You can try the framebuffer / EFI driver, from OpenCore / EnableGOP sometimes that is good enough

Need spoofless or -no_compat_check if running via OpenCore to get over the BoardID check of 10.6.8

 

[twotone]

You can try the framebuffer / EFI driver, from OpenCore / EnableGOP sometimes that is good enough

Need spoofless or -no_compat_check if running via OpenCore to get over the BoardID check of 10.6.8

Thanks, I'll look into this more

 

[RumoredTone]

If a good Snow Leopard experience is your priority, I don't think a single GPU will be able to smoothly cover that much Mac OS version history. If it's old enough to work in Snow Leopard, it won't have the Metal requirement for Mojave and beyond. And the Metal cards that work well in newer macOS versions (with OpenCore) tend to begin their driver support at something much newer than Snow Leopard.

If you're able to use Mountain Lion instead of Snow Leopard, there are a few options that can work. The Nvidia 600 series (GTX 670 or 680) are Metal cards that became supported in Mountain Lion, and can get you all the way to Monterey with OpenCore. But it sounds like Snow Leopard is the more important part for you. So I would say that your best option would be to go with something that would have shipped with a Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 (Radeon HD 4870, 5770, or 5870, or a comparable Mac Nvidia card from the time). With any of these, you can install Snow Leopard and High Sierra natively. And then, using OpenCore Legacy Patcher, you can also try Big Sur or Monterey with the non-Metal GPU acceleration patches. It won't be as good an experience as it would be with a Metal GPU, but the non-Metal patches are always improving, so you could at least try it out and decide if it's worthwhile for you. You mentioned video editing, though. That sounds like something that would likely fail to run without Metal.

You can see which GPU series are supported in the Legacy Non-Metal GPUs issue on GitHub (and also see the history of bugs that have been resolved or not).

One more small thing, unrelated to GPUs: if you set up a Snow Leopard volume along with volumes for High Sierra or newer, keep in mind that Snow Leopard won't be able to access APFS-formatted volumes directly. It won't show up in Snow Leopard's Startup Disk, for example. APFS is optional for High Sierra, but I think newer versions like Monterey require it for boot drives. It's something to keep your eye on, if you decide to go beyond High Sierra. You'll want to make sure you have a strategy for accessing data and switching between startup volumes, if it's a mix of HFS+ and APFS.

Good luck!

 

[mateo14]

It's surprising that Mac Pro users have these incredible applications like OCLP, and we have issues with Mac OS X 10.6.

It would be incredible if someone could create an application that can switch between graphic cards for Mac OS X 10.6. In this case, we could select a supported graphic card and a driver that should be loaded when Mac OS X 10.6 is booting.

Mac Pro 5,1 is capable of running applications and games that were created from 2001 until 2024. It could be the best Mac that Apple created if someone can figure out how to load drivers for the supported graphic card in Mac OS X 10.6.

 

[tsialex]

If you need to run 10.6.8 and 12.7.4, use virtualization for Snow Leopard, accept having no acceleration via EnableGop or simply have two Mac Pros.

Anything else is a kludge and have serious inconveniences, like missing a PCIe slot and having issues after High Sierra.