Just wanted to let you guys know that I was able to fix all my problems by switching my SMBIOS to iMac Pro 1,1.
The issue I had was that whenever I disabled iGPU in BIOS, DRM (iTunes, Netflix, HBO, etc.) would work but FCPX wouldn't. Whenever I enabled iGPU in BIOS, FCPX would work but DRM would not. Vicious cycle. Since iMac Pro uses only dGPU, it doesn't use iGPU for encoding in FCPX (iMovie etc) therefore I am having no issues just sticking with the dGPU. Even when iGPU is enabled in BIOS (but probably unused by OS).
I was worried that it would affect my sleep and CPU performance since I am using i7 8700k not a Xeon. I haven't noticed any down falls. I am going to look into speedstep, lower frequency, etc. to see if it that part of the CPU is affected, however, my Overclock is still working (4.7Ghz) and honestly that is all I care about but for those interested I will post back and let you guys know what I find.
At risk of flogging the dead horse here, using the proper SMBIOS and shikigva bootflags also solved my issues. In my case, I had a Haswell machine that I was trying to get to work with a couple of different known-good cards (RX 570, GT 710). The RX 570, I didn't have the iGPU set as headless in Clover's Devices-->Properties section,
as per this guide, and also had to set the bootflag "shikigva=80". The GT 710--more valueable for this specific project since it is lower power and fanless--really did need a) to have the iGPU disabled and b) to use an MacPro/iMacPro SMBIOS (this was the key) c) to use the right bootflag for this config, "shikigva=256".
It's not really obvious from the nomenclature but the iGPU (in my case, on a Xeon E3-1246v3 I got on the cheap) is disabled enough for the purposes of getting the GT 710 to work with streaming DRM simply by turning off the 'iGPU Multi-Monitor' option in the BIOS, if there is no explicit option to shut off the iGPU entirely. It will still be detected by WhateverGreen, Hackintool, etc, as being present but not working properly, but so long as you've removed whatever enabling hacks from Clover (or I suppose OpenCore, which I have no tried yet), it is of no consequence. The only 'issue' I've come across is when playing the random Apple TV+ episode that has a preview at the beginning of it. In those cases, for whatever reason, the preview audio plays back, but without video--until you try to seek, at which point video returns. This is inelegant and I'd be interested to know if anybody else is running a Haswell with a GT 710 that doesn't run into this, but at the same time, it's basically tolerable.
One thing I ended up doing, in case, say, you want to continue using the iGPU in other OSes, or if your BIOS really doesn't have any way of disabling your iGPU, is making a DSDT that patches it out. This is simple enough to do; I just took
Dortania's template and filled in the standard location (for many generations now) of Intel's iGPU. It goes in with the other DSDT's at EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched, and then you just have to add the name of it ("SSDT-IGPU-DISABLE.aml") to the ACPI-->SortedOrder section. This way, the isn't even detected as present by WhateverGreen or Hackintool. I think I experienced some slowness with 2D graphics like this though--but don't quote me on it, worth trying yourself if you're in a situation. You can confirm that it's working properly by checking the log under Hackintool-->Logs-->Boot. I've attached the aml and the decompiled source to this post if you want to try it out, though again it's easy enough to make yourself per the Vanilla or OpenCore guides.
Anyway. I guess all of this really follows from
the WhateverGreen DRM chart here (except for the weirdness with previews), where it's clearly laid out which configurations are supposed to do what and why. My experience appears more or less to track this (though I have not tried the MacPro SMBIOS with the RX 570 yet--I don't really see the point--nor have I tested Amazon or Netflix in Safari on the RX 570, since I never really use Safari and it's not critical for my use-case). That said, I hope this quick write-up is helpful to someone. I last tried to tackle this stuff about a year ago, and got nowhere, though I don't quite remember why; I was using a different, kind of marginal board, it could be it had issues with hardware, could be I didn't use the right flags--I did disable the iGPU in the BIOS, not sure if this didn't take or what. Regardless, it was pretty frustrating, so, if this cuts down the guesswork for anybody, so much the better.
github.com
