iM 4,1-14,4 27in iMac 2011 GPU Linux questions and advise

[Oldmopars]

I now have my 27in 2011 iMac up and running. It has an i7 2600s and the 3 pipe GPU cooler.
I have been playing with ElementaryOS and so far I really like it. It emulates Mac OS, but it is able to run current software without issue.
If I plan to run it with nothing but Linux, do I need to do all of the VBIOS and whatnot? I have read everything I can find on the GPU swap pages and I am still confused. I also read somewhere, but can't find it again, that you can run almost any GPU if you use Linux or Windows.
I don't care about the boot screen, I only plan to run Linux, I have Mac OS on my MB Pro and don't need it on this.
If anyone can help clear up my confusion, and suggest a good card I would be very grateful.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

I now have my 27in 2011 iMac up and running. It has an i7 2600s and the 3 pipe GPU cooler.
I have been playing with ElementaryOS and so far I really like it. It emulates Mac OS, but it is able to run current software without issue.
If I plan to run it with nothing but Linux, do I need to do all of the VBIOS and whatnot? I have read everything I can find on the GPU swap pages and I am still confused. I also read somewhere, but can't find it again, that you can run almost any GPU if you use Linux or Windows.
I don't care about the boot screen, I only plan to run Linux, I have Mac OS on my MB Pro and don't need it on this.
If anyone can help clear up my confusion, and suggest a good card I would be very grateful.

Without a cooked vBIOS, many MXM cards may not be able to display anything on the internal LCD of the iMac.
For Linux, I would suggest the quadro for reliability with iMac 2011 and performance.
I've been using the Quadro M4000 and I think it's a GPU with good price per performance ratio with affordable price range to me.

 

[Oldmopars]

Without a cooked vBIOS, many MXM cards may not be able to display anything on the internal LCD of the iMac.
For Linux, I would suggest the quadro for reliability with iMac 2011 and performance.
I've been using the Quadro M4000 and I think it's a GPU with good price per performance ratio with affordable price range to me.

So, right now I have OCLP running Sequoia 15.7. Other than my slow HDD (replacing soon) I don't have any issues with it. YouTube videos play back fine, nothing so far has complained. It has the Radeon HD 6970M. Do they have Metal support of is OCLP doing something to allow it to work? I think I am missing something. I didn't think I could run anything after High Sierra.
That M4000 looks like a good option, would it work good for Fusion, Blender, Mesh Mixer, etc.? I have an i7 2600S with 32gb RAM.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

So, right now I have OCLP running Sequoia 15.7. Other than my slow HDD (replacing soon) I don't have any issues with it. YouTube videos play back fine, nothing so far has complained. It has the Radeon HD 6970M. Do they have Metal support of is OCLP doing something to allow it to work? I think I am missing something. I didn't think I could run anything after High Sierra.
That M4000 looks like a good option, would it work good for Fusion, Blender, Mesh Mixer, etc.? I have an i7 2600S with 32gb RAM.

To my understanding,
1. Quadro M4000m can only work in High Sierra, it doesn't have compatible drivers for later Mac OS, thus no Metal support, naturally.
2. Quadro M series is popular in workstation laptops computer running Windows, therefore I assume it will work well in Linux environment, too.
3. Quadro M series does not support HEVC encode/decode by hardware

You can run Sequoia with HD6970m thanks to OCLP, it doesn't have metal support.