Im running Big Sur on my early 2011 13inch pro i7 with a 500 gb ssd and 16 gigs of ram. I used open core legacy patcher to install big sur and the required patches to get gpu acceleration to work. My computer is running very well and fast. There is noo need to try a gpu upgrade. If you can try to get a new airport card to get airdrop working, i feel as that would be the only other worthwhile hardware upgrade.
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