Updating the Mac Pro 5.1 in 2021. Episode 2: getting an “accelerated” Catalina.
In the first round we got a hardware accelerated Mojave installation, via Open Core. Now it’s time to move on Catalina and use FCP 10.5.
We’re in 2021, at the beginning of the new shiny Apple-ARM era, but many people still own a “classic” Mac Pro and still want to upgrade to unsupported versions of macOS.
Why upgrade to Catalina?
In the first Episode, we installed Mojave and obtained the H264/H265 hardware acceleration inside the overpriced RX GPU you bought.
Mojave is a great release of macOS, very solid, introduces full support for Metal but keeps a reassuring aspect with the good iTunes still in place. It also received the October 2021 security updates.
Catalina on the other hand was a controversial release that was pretty buggy when released and broke iTunes into 3 different apps. In the first versions the macs were slowed down and also Final Cut 10.4 exported slightly more slowly.
But there are reason to update, now that Catarina is fixed.
