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I recently had installed OLCP Montery on my 2009 Mac Pro. The Mac also had a firmware update to the 5,1. Anyways, I have plugged a Dicasver RX 580 16GB into the Mac, and it worked. But the card only shows up as 8MB of VRAM, hence the slow performance. Is there a way to get MacOS to take use of the entire 16GB of VRAM? (The card's bios was not tampered with).
'not enough Real RAM' does not look like the problem either, although that display appears to be shortly after startup.
but rather than asking you, is it this guess, is it that guess, consider downloading and running this little "discovery" utility, Etrecheck. it changes NOTHING.
it contains little tests for speeds of devices, CPU utilization, memory usage, energy usage and a digest of recent problems, in one easy to use package. it does not even need to be Installed. Because less can be learned when your Mac is running great, best time to run is when your problems are actually occurring, if possible.
if you follow the directions faithfully, its report (pre-laundered of all personally-identifiable information) can be "Shared" to the system ClipBoard, then Pasted into an Additional text window in a reply on the forums.
How to use Etrecheck pro for free
...

menu > About this Mac > (system report) > Hardare > Graphics & Displays
what size is shown for that display card?
______
<< hence the slow performance >>
¿How did you decide you had "slow performance"?
Opening launchpad is NOT dependent on the amount of VRAM is the slightest.
If you said your wire-frame shader was slow to draw skin on your 3D models, you might be onto something -- blaming THAT slow performance on VRAM.
how much Real RAM is your machine? what type of Boot device?
67 crashes are due to completely obsolete and un-necessary dosdude patcher stuff that does not work on MacOS this modern.
You REALLY need an SSD drive to improve your overall speed. Rotating Magnetic drive is the source of most of your Lag. SATA SSD is a drive bay would be a big improvement and is easy to install with a 2.5-in drive adapter/sled. OWC sells both. That would get you up to read speeds of about 550-ish M bytes/sec. compared to your current Read/write speed of 60-ish M Bytes/sec compared to a new Mac studio at 5,000 M Bytes/sec.
The bulk of the remaining lag is caused by Chrome, with is an enormous resource hog. Almost any other browser solution would be less demanding of resources. The item hogging the CPU that etrecheck called out is Chrome, in Crome helper renderer, chome helper and chrome itself. using over 100 percent of you CPU.
You have turned off
[√] Install system data files and security updates -- that should be on.
I dunno whether you can turn system integrity protection back on, but that would be preferable if possible.
SPEED: If Drive SPEED is what you seek, there are Solid State Drives SATA SSD drives you could install in a Mac Pro 5,1 silver tower drive bay for comparable amounts of money that can attain nominal 550 M Bytes/sec speeds, about 10 times faster than the fastest Rotating Magnetic drives.
Next higher is a simple x4 PCIe card (under US$30 for the empty card) that could provide nominal 1500 M Bytes/sec in your Mac Pro 5,1 in a PCIe2 x4 slot. Installation is slightly more complex, because you must apply a heat transfer pad to the SSD stick and bolt on a heatsink (included in the kits).
Somewhat more complex and far more expensive are PCIe card with x8 or x16 capability. The Mac Pro does not support ‘bifurcation’ (i.e., writing to each x4 of an x8 slot separately) so a complex full-width drive controller chip on the card is required. This makes x8 cards far more expensive than x4 cards, and x16 cards more expensive still. But possibly twice as fast or more.
The Sabrent NVME PCIe card sold as ”x16/x8/x4” has a physical x16 connector, fits in the wide slots on an older Intel Mac Pro, but is only electrically an x4 card.
KerbalSpaceProgramPlayer wrote:
The Chinese RX 580 was only an experiment. I originally did not think that it would work.
The RX580 card appears to work fine, but yours does Not appear to be a 16 GB card. Mac Drivers are said to have first appeared in MacOS Sierra 10.12.6, but support for Metal may be slower than cards flashed to Apple firmware.
Graphics cards is Not what is slowing your Mac, so that card (at 8Gb OR 16GB) is not a solution to speeding it up.
if that Rotating magnetic drive is not the boot drive you normally use, switch to the one use and post a new Etrecheck report.
Ram = 24GB
Boot device is a WD BLUE HDD
The 8MB of VRAM that MacOS is currently allocating is not enough for the system to run without having slowness. Ex: Opening Launchpad causes significant lag.
I already have an OWC adapter, and when this Mac is running the HD 7970, it is way faster.
The Chinese RX 580 was only an experiment. I originally did not think that it would work.
Allocating more vram on Chinese Dicasver RX 580
