Radeon Compatibility Guide - ATI/AMD Graphics Cards

[mm2margaret]

I flashed my PowerColor Red Dragon Vega 56 with Sapphire Nitro+ Vega 64 BIOS and it works really well.

Yea, well, my reference PowerColor Vega 56 works fine as long as I only use the DP port(s), and I don't have that many complaints about it.

My point for the post really was about the fact that the Sapphire Nitro+ Vega 64s worked just fine, were completely compatible with 10.14.5 and later, and worked on both the DP and HDMI ports......so more compatible, not less......

 

[pastrychef]

Yea, well, my reference PowerColor Vega 56 works fine as long as I only use the DP port, and I don't have that many complaints about it. My point really was that the Sapphire Nitro+ Vega 64s worked just fine, were completely compatible with 10.14.5 and later, and worked on both the DP and HDMI ports......so more compatible, not less......

Hmm... I would expect that the HDMI ports on my card would behave like those on the Nitro+... I'll have to mess around with it a bit more...

 

[Silverman]

@Silverman,

As long as you get a card that follows the AMD reference design then you should be ok, the RX 5XX series reference design has four output ports (1 x HDMI + 3 x DP) and has no DVI port. Some OEM ship their cards with different port configurations and some also have an additional 5th port (sometimes a DVI) ... these non reference designs can cause problems in MacOS as the different/extra ports are not included in the default AMD framebuffer's, in most cases you can patch the framebuffer (see the guide in Post #1).

You can use a DP to HDMI adapter if you need an additional HDMI port, as DP is fully backwards compatible with HDMI.

Cheers
Jay

Thanks a lot, Jay.
I've just bought Sapphire RX 580 Pulse with 2xHDMI and it starts sumptuously without any manipulation.

 

[mcdangerous]

Hello everyone, I don’t know if I’m writing right here, such a problem ... the wrong resolution was set in the Clover menu (ver. 5018), cured the problem by installing the CsmVideoDxe driver, but after that the system stopped loading, the screen lights up but instead of booting the system the usual flicker, video card sapphire Radeon Nitro+ RX 580. On the Russian forum, of course, they could not help)

 

[jaymonkey]

Definitely avoid XFX brands as they're known to have BIOS incompatibility issues with MacOS. There's a workaround but it's not worth the hassle. Just get ASUS, MSI, Sapphire or Gigabyte.

I believe that it was only the XFX RX 460 & 560 GPU's that had the VBIOS problem which caused a massive issue for XFX and a ton of bad press, after that they stuck with the reference VBIOS.

Cheers
Jay

 

[Gigamaxx]

maybe you can replace the video card with a more supportive one. maybe ATI Radeon 5450 or NVIDIA GTX 760

5450 only works up to Sierra. 760 should work through Catalina.

 

[artouiros]

Hello guys. Hope you can help me, thanks you all for replies. I have managed to install High Sierra 10.13.3 and everything works fine except H.264/HEVC hw acceleration. I am using videoproc to check, here is screenshot:

I am using Lilu and WhateverGreen and my card is R9 380 2Gb version. It shows in ábout this mac', I can see it with ID in hwinfo, overall system acceleration works fine. geekbench 4 OpenCL benchmark gave me about 65000 score.

I did install Hackintool to determinate which framebuffer am I using, and as I understood I am using RadeonFramebuffer, but in #1 it shows that my R9 380 uses Lagotto. I haven't understood if RadeonFramebuffer is good and will I get any perfomance boost if I somehow change it to Lagotto.


Anyway, does H.264/HEVC acceleration has something to do with framebuffer? I am new to hackintosh scene, my OSX install is 3 days from birth.

I made a cinebench r15 for testign purposes:

 

[jaymonkey]

everything works fine except H.264/HEVC hw acceleration. I am using videoproc to check

@artouiros,

Videoproc is a very basic encode app and can not be relied upon to report what is going on in MacOS.
The only reliable method to monitor which encoder/decoder service is being used is by looking in Activity Monitor ..

Play (or encode) video, Open Activity Monitor, find VTDecoderXPCService (or alternate encode/decode service), double click on it, and select "Open Files or Ports" ... examine the output to find if MacOS is using IGPU, dGPU or Software decode/encode.

does H.264/HEVC acceleration has something to do with framebuffer?

SMBIOS generally dictates how GUP's are used for video encode/decode ....

MacOS choses which encode/decode service to use based on SMBIOS, GPU's installed and type of encode/decode required, for example if running a dual GPU configuration (dGPU + IGPU) and you want to playback H264 via IQS then MacOS must have correct headless IGPU platform ID and a SMBIOS that supports that configuration.

You profile details that you are using an AMD CPU ... TMx86 does not support or condone the use of modified kernels.
If this is true then you will most likely have issues as no SMBIOS supports AMD CPU.

Cheers
Jay

 

[artouiros]

It was my secondary Windows PC in profile, I do not use modified kernel too and not support such things.

 

[Gigamaxx]

@artouiros,

Videoproc is a very basic encode app and can not be relied upon to report what is going on in MacOS.
The only reliable method to monitor which encoder/decoder service is being used is by looking in Activity Monitor ..

Play (or encode) video, Open Activity Monitor, find VTDecoderXPCService (or alternate encode/decode service), double click on it, and select "Open Files or Ports" ... examine the output to find if MacOS is using IGPU, dGPU or Software decode/encode.




SMBIOS generally dictates how GUP's are used for video encode/decode ....

MacOS choses which encode/decode service to use based on SMBIOS, GPU's installed and type of encode/decode required, for example if running a dual GPU configuration (dGPU + IGPU) and you want to playback H264 via IQS then MacOS must have correct headless IGPU platform ID and a SMBIOS that supports that configuration.

You profile details that you are using an AMD CPU ... TMx86 does not support or condone the use of modified kernels.
If this is true then you will most likely have issues as no SMBIOS supports AMD CPU.

Cheers
Jay

Off topic but some new info.
There has been a breakthrough now and users of those CPUs can use kernel to patch section in clover. It’s an awful lot of patches though. So no more custom kernel needed.

The early release info on WEG mentioned not to assign a specific framebuffer as it uses the generic Radeonframebuffer to do its work and assign ports etc...