[GUIDE] RX 580 on Catalina and P55-USB3 board

[miliuco]

Radeon RX 580 8 GB graphics card on macOS High Sierra (as of 10.13.6), Mojave and Catalina on the P55-USB3 board: excellent performance with acceleration (Metal) OOB, no need for drivers (kexts), with 3 drawbacks, one has to do with the boot of the operating system (a solution is proposed), another with the number of rear connectors enabled (a solution is proposed) and another that only affects to one phase of the Mojave or Catalina installation (without clear solution for now).

I have placed the XFX AMD Radeon RX-580 P8DFD6 8GB Triple X Edition GDDR5, 256BIT, DVI + HDMI + 3DP graphics card on a 10 year old motherboard (Gigabyte P55-USB3) in order to update the hackintosh to 10.14 Mojave and 10.15 Catalina because the card that I have used in past years, Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 1GB, has stopped working after 10.13.6 High Sierra since this was the last version for which Nvidia published the alternate web drivers that were necessary for the card to work well with graphic acceleration.

The new RX 580 card needs considerably more space than the old one although it fits perfectly in an ATX case, and requires an additional power connector. It has 2 big fans that most of the time are stopped, at least in my case. In macOS it works perfectly, even with Metal acceleration, without additional drivers and without extra settings in Clover. But it has drawbacks that I comment below.

Alterations during startup

During the boot of the operating system, when the screen goes from the basic driver to the AMD driver, 2 artifacts appear randomly, they are very short in duration (from one to a few seconds):

• Very short flashing white screen that may or may not be accompanied by purple lines
• The fans runs for a few seconds (the noise is clearly audible).

This behavior is solved with the installation of 2 kexts, Lilu and WhateverGreen. Lilu is an extension created by acidanthera and vit9696 among others whose function is to help to patch kexts, processes and libraries during macOS boot. It is accompanied by specific plugins for the task required, for example WhateverGreen that injects necessary patches for certain AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics cards. It is mandatory to have both extensions together, one of them separately does not correct the problem.

I have installed Lilu 1.4.4 and WhateverGreen 1.3.9 in the EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other folder of the EFI partition and artifacts have disappeared. Remember that these 2 extensions are not necessary for the card to work properly, if you tolerate those very brief distortions of the screen or the noise of the fans running for a few seconds, you can live without Lilu and WhateverGreen.

Note: authors recommend that when using Lilu and WhateverGreen with Radeon cards, NO graphic settings have to be added to Clover (Inject ATI, etc.).

Note: these alterations, especially the brief white screen and less frequently purple lines and fan noise, are also seen in Windows and some real Macs with the same card.

Alteration during macOS installation

Boot from USB > Clover menu > Install macOS from Install macOS Catalina > screen works fine
Boot from USB > Clover menu > Install macOS from MacintoshHD > black screen
Booting from USB > Clover menu > Boot macOS from MacintoshHD > screen works fine.

In the first and third stages, screen works fine. In the second stage the screen goes black although the installation continues. The user has nothing to do at this moment so you can leave the PC working until the Clover menu is shown again, the screen is recovered, the initial account options can be configured and you can enter into the newly installed system with correct resolution and acceleration.

This behavior is not corrected even by placing Lilu and WhateverGreen into the USB device. At least in my case I have not found a solution for it. Yo can install macOS perfectly with that drawback of not seeing how it progresses during the second phase of the installation.

Only 2 connectors of the 5 available work

This card has 3 Display Port (DP) ports, 1 HDMI port and 1 DVI port. In my case, only 2 DP work, those that are further from the HDMI connector. It is enough if you use a single monitor or 2 monitors that can be connected by DP. But if you want to have 3 or more connected devices or some of them only have HDMI, it is necessary to enable the 5 connectors or at least 4 of them since the DVI is obsolete and does not allow resolutions as high as DP and HDMI.

User foxbox has proposed a solution in the thread titled [Solved] Sapphire RX 580 Nitro + SE | black screen on HDMI and DVI. Must inject from Clover a modification to the Orinoco framebuffer (which is used in the RX 580 card) so that the 5 connectors lack a fixedly assigned address and, instead, receive it dynamically. This change is made from the KextsToPatch section of Clover.

This has to be accompanied by 3 changes in the Graphics section of Clover: Orinoco in FB Name / Inject ATI / 5 in Video Ports. I have tested this solution in macOS Catalina and it effectively enables the 5 ports of the card but, since I only use 1 monitor, I have removed it and I am with Lilu and WhateverGreen.

 

[sriHacPro]

Thanks for the info.

 

[Tijhevv]

I'm experienced very odd behaviour with my GPU. I first tried an old AMD 280x with my dual Xeon system in High sierra which worked flawlessly, however after booting into Mojave, during normal use windows sometimes wouldn't fully appear (And where stuck as tiny pop ups that haven't fully animated) During cinebench the render blocks couldn't be seen unless holding space bar. I ordered an XFX 580 8GB to replace the card and alot of the issues still exist. Would you say this is a GPU or CPU problem? (Might even be motherboard problem) But it works perfectly in High Sierra

 

[miliuco]

I'm experienced very odd behaviour with my GPU...

It may be normal that your old graphics card works fine in High Sierra but not in Mojave or Catalina. Regarding the problem with the RX580 card, you can see that mine works well in Mojave and Catalina without showing those artifacts and bugs. So I think they are not caused by the graphics card but I can not be sure. I can't help you as much as I would like.

 

[Tijhevv]

It may be normal that your old graphics card works fine in High Sierra but not in Mojave or Catalina. Regarding the problem with the RX580 card, you can see that mine works well in Mojave and Catalina without showing those artifacts and bugs. So I think they are not caused by the graphics card but I can not be sure. I can't help you as much as I would like.

I really appreciate your reply. The 280x does work very well on my i5 machine in Mojave. I believe it’s an issue regarding the CPU’s PCIE lanes, which unfortunately due to the size of the board I can only access the top lane which is for Cpu 2, so I may have to take everything out to try the bottom slot. I should be fine on my own but I really do appreciate the reply

 

[miliuco]

...I should be fine on my own but I really do appreciate the reply

 

[stonecoldro]

@miliuco : did you use the stock vbios in your radeon card? or did you flash to another vendor like Sapphire?

I have the exact same video card as you and would like to have any addition information possible, as my previous attempts have failed in installing Catalina.

LE: when creating the USB usinbg unibeast, did you select AtiInject?

Thanks

 

[miliuco]

did you use the stock vbios in your radeon card? or did you flash to another vendor like Sapphire?...

I use the original vbios of the graphics card, XFX. In Clover's Graphics tab I have nothing checked, AtiInject neither. I only have Lilu and WEG, last versions, and nothing else. And in the SMBIOS tab I have iMac19,1. With that settings the card seems to work fine.

 

[stonecoldro]

Sadly that didn't workout for me. I returned the card and now I'm looking at other options of 570 or 580 from other manufacturers. XFX seems to be very problematic.

Any suggestions?

 

[miliuco]

Sadly that didn't workout for me. I returned the card and now I'm looking at other options of 570 or 580 from other manufacturers. XFX seems to be very problematic. Any suggestions?

Saphire has good comments on forums. Also EVGA and MSI. In fact XFX seems to be the only brand that uses a custom bios that sometimes gives problems with hackintosh. Saphire RX 580 Nitro is commented as trouble free.