Best cheap mac video card for UE4.16?

Hi,

I’m learning UE, and I want to be able to run 4.16.1 on my Mac Pro 5,1. The problem is that when I try to launch the UE editor, I get this error:

**OpenGL Not Supported
**You must have a Metal compatible graphics card and be running Mac OS X 10.11.6 or later to launch this process.

Unfortunately, while I have two decent (for the time) graphics cards (an ATI HD 5870 and an ATI HD 5770), they won’t pass muster. I don’t want to spend very much (pref < $200) since by the time I’m doing anything really complicated, I’ll want to upgrade anyway. For now, I need tolerable performance only.

Here’s my system specs as they are:
MacOS Sierra 10.12.5 (latest)
Mac Pro 5,1 (2010)
6 Core 3.33GHz Xeon
32 GB RAM
12 TB Internal RAID

Any advice? NVIDIA seems like the better choice (I may also want to run some CUDA experiments). Newegg has a variety of GTX 1050 and 1060 models in that range, and a few GTX 950. Anyone know what works?

Thanks much!

Any modern PC gpu will be compatible. The question is what performance you need. The 1060 would be a great choice.

If you get one that doesnt have a mac-specific BIOS then you’ll have to put up with not seeing anything on the screen during bootup.

Make sure you get one that has the right power-connector types to support the cables that your Mac Pro supports (from my memory 6 pin rather than 8 pin but dont take my word for it).

I did it with a specific EVGA 970 card last year but obviously things have moved on a bit with the 10 series cards and nvidia eventually releasing a mac driver for them.

I prefer nvidia cards but if you want to do things like try the High Sierra beta before nvidia release drivers for it, you might want to research what AMD cards have built in macOS drivers these days.

Keep your old cards (which presumably have mac BIOS) handy because there will be times during install of operating system/system boot repair etc that you will need to put the original card back in to be able to see anything.

What did you end up doing? I’m in the exact same situation as you right now and am pretty screwed!