Not showing Metal support - why

Given the Apple support article and given the inclusion of that AMD Radeon R9 M290 GPU in the following Metal benchmark data:

… https://browser.geekbench.com/metal-benchmarks

I suspect this is just a display artifact from the rather old OS X 10.11 version running on that iMac.

That iMac is supported as far as macOS 11 (as differentiated from OS X 10.11) and I’d expect an upgrade would show Metal support here, assuming that older OS X 10.11 version does not.

An iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Mid 2015) can go as far as Big Sur, but no further.

I can see why you might want to avoid Catalina and Big Sur. Neither will run 32-bit applications. Catalina is no longer one of the "most recent three"; soon, Big Sur will also fall off that list. So you might lose access to 32-bit applications without gaining access to current applications from the likes of Microsoft and Adobe.

But is there some reason that you're avoiding High Sierra and Mojave?!?

El Capitan is never going to get any new updates. So if there's a bug that keeps you from using Metal 2, it's never going to be fixed in that OS. If you have Metal 2, but there's a bug that keeps System Information from showing it, that's never going to be fixed in that OS.

If the Apple Support document is incorrect and there are some special cases they forgot to mention (cases along the lines of "El Capitain has Metal 2 support, but won't report it", the Support document might eventually be fixed – but don't count on it. I doubt if Apple's tech writers are spending much time looking back at El Capitan and 2015 iMacs. They are probably being rated by their bosses based mostly on how well they document current hardware and software.

Bottom line: It is whatever it is. Your choices are to live with it, or to upgrade to a newer version of macOS (maybe trying it out on a spare external drive first, so you don't have to commit to the upgrade), in hopes that this problem is fixed in some version of macOS (SIerra? High SIerra? Mojave?) that can still run most of your software.

SergeantMac wrote:

Well not according to Apple pursuant to the above article. The Mid 2015 iMac running OS 10.11 incorporates the AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 MB graphics card and Apple says this configuration has Metal capabilities. So ???

You’re basically between the proverbial rock and the hard place, a place that these cases will eventually and inevitably visit.

Software doesn’t run forever without the OS and hardware, and increasingly without connections, and the OS eventually becomes increasingly difficult to securely network with app-necessary services.

The work of sourcing spare parts or of repairing failing hardware and of keeping the software connections working involved gets progressively harder and more expensive, too.

At some point, replacing or upgrading or overhauling that dependency usually becomes the least-bad choice. Whether you’ve yet reached that point?

Source: I work on enterprise hardware and software—what are euphemistically called “legacy” apps—that can be twenty and thirty years and older, and it’s expensive to maintain and update it. Welcome to the club. 😉

Metal requires an AMD Radeon™ R9 M290X or better - Metal capable GPU.

You could be right.

I believe MrHoffman already explained the issue, which I agreed with.