Video Card Upgrade - Plug and Play is what I hope for

[ThrasherOSX]

I have as you can see in my hardware profile a NVIDIA 950 2mb, I have the urge to upgrade to a more robust gaming card, however, I know how to fix all the problems that come up with the NVIDIA GTX 950, I am wondering if anyone knows if I upgrade to one of the following cards (or if they are worth it) I am gaming more on the PC side of the house but I do play COD4 on the Mac side, so I want the card to serve well in both places. Basically I am looking for a card in the ~$300 range and I don't want to reinvent the wheel when I plug it in, I am thinking this lends itself to the NVIDIA cards, however, if the troubles with 17,1 are fixed on the AMD cards, perhaps that's the way to go. Any advise is appreciated.

Made my choice, I am going with the Sapphire Card, everything I can find is that this is a plug and play card with Macintosh High Sierra and gets me away from the black screen issues NVIDIA can present.

Sapphire RX 580 Pulse 8GB AMD
Form: Dual Slot
Memory: 8GB DDR5
Ports: 2xHDMI, 2xDP, DVI
Clock: 1366MHz

 

[draymis]

I'm also looking for a new card that's plug and play to drive 1 - possibly 2 - 4K monitors.

Do you mind sharing the link where you bought your card and about how much you paid?

Also, did you look at the XFX RX 570 8GB, and if so, was it about the same level of plug and play?

 

[ThrasherOSX]

I'm also looking for a new card that's plug and play to drive 1 - possibly 2 - 4K monitors.

Do you mind sharing the link where you bought your card and about how much you paid?

Also, did you look at the XFX RX 570 8GB, and if so, was it about the same level of plug and play?

The suggested cards I looked at where all from the buyers guide. I ended up getting it from Amazon, it was slightly cheaper than the Newegg site. As I was searching about I found that the Sapphire card is natively supported and based on reviews I read and posts on this forum, I decided to go for it. I'll post here with the results of install if you can wait a few days, I haven't gotten a 4k monitor yet... but I too am thinking dual monitors in the future. Cost was just under $350.

 

[ThrasherOSX]

Ok, so the card showed up on my doorstep this afternoon. I was eager to get it installed and got right to it.

The first thing I needed to do was to remove my NVIDIA web driver, uninstalled through preference pane. Second step was to mount the EFI and use clover configurator to uncheck the NVIDIA Web Driver check box (while I was in there I also removed the Inject Intel under Graphics, I read somewhere that it was not needed as I am not using on-board video). Third, remove the NVIDIA card and install the Sapphire ATI RX 580. Upon startup, I entered BIOS to disable on-board video a step I never did prior but didn't seem to harm anything, save and exit, allowed the computer to boot. Full screen video no problems at all.

AND THEN!

I thought of a conversation I had on here and realized I didn't undo the Black Screen fix for iMac 17,1 profiles (to which I thought was an NVIDIA thing). So I undid this set of instructions:
Method 3:

1. Open Terminal
2. Enter this command (it is one line)
   sudo nano /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsControl.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleGraphicsDevicePolicy.kext/Contents/Info.plist
3. Arrow down to where you see <key>ConfigMap</key>
4. For the iMac17,1 Mac-B809C3757DA9BB8D change the appropriate entry to "none".
5. Save the file by pressing Ctrl+O, then enter.
6. Exit by pressing Ctrl+X
7. Rebuild the kernel cache using the following two commands in terminal:
   sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
   sudo kextcache -system-caches
8. Reboot

I inserted "Config2" which was what was originally there. Upon reboot, about 3/4 of the way through the progress bar loading, screen goes black and the GPU shuts OFF!!!! OMG I just fried my card. Panic. Restart, everything is working, go to windows this time. No problems... Restart to Mac. Same thing... Undo what you "Fixed" and see if it works, just need a working screen, I used clover boot screen to inject Radeon under GUI I don't recall what it was called, but thank god it worked. Back into terminal.... reapply the fix for black screen. "none". Restart, all is well. I have some of the before and after benchmarks below:



For both the Unigine I had settings maxed out on Ultra and Antialiasing at 8x for both cards: