If you still have a Mac Pro from 2010 or 2012 in use, you can be happy: Apple officially supports the installation of macOS Mojave 10.14 on these computers. All you need is one of the graphics cards listed here.
The nice thing about the Mac Pros from those years is their easy upgradeability. Since Apple officially requires a metal-compatible graphics card for Mojave, you can simply install one. And Apple even supports this fair enough and even gives you the appropriate models! The bottom line is that you want this result to be displayed in the System Profiler: a metal-compatible graphic.
Metal compatible and Apple officially supported graphics cards for Mac Pro 2010, 2012
Apple claims that these graphics cards are fully compatible with macOS 10.14 Mojave. These models cost around 200 Euro and are therefore a good investment to continue using an older Mac Pro with the latest software.
- 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
Furthermore these models are listed with more general names. These should run, but Apple doesn’t guarantee that. So if you buy a new one, you’d better go for one of the models listed above. Otherwise you can of course try your luck.
- 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
No bootscreen? Then better no File Vault!
Apple also expressly points out that some of the models mentioned are running, but if there is no Mac version, they will probably not display a boot screen, i.e. the first display with Apple logo and progress bar. This also has the consequence that File Vault is not able to enter the password when encrypting the hard disk.
Many third-party graphics cards won’t show anything on the display when macOS Mojave is starting up, including the Apple logo and startup progress bar. As a result, you can’t log in to a system that uses FileVault, choose a different startup disk before your Mac boots into macOS, or perform some hardware diagnostics.
You’ll need to turn off File Vault and then follow the steps to download and install macOS Mojave on your Mac Pro.
In this case, deactivate File Vault first and then install the graphics card.
It’s nice to see that Apple also offers support for the older systems. Another good step towards sustainability.
