Buying a Dedicated GPU for your Monterey, Ventura or Sonoma Hackintosh

[craighazan]

If MacOS supported the AMD Radeon RX 6400 card, I would have used that on my Mini-ITX Hacks, but no go. In fact I wanted to play Cyan's "Firmament" so badly (after backing its Kickstarter 4 years ago), I converted "Mini-ITX 2" (below) to Windows 11, just so I could install that card. BTW, it works great on Firmament using AMD's "Adrenalin" driver software on Win 11.

Isn't the 6400 worse than the RX560?. I'm using a modded RX 560 built from a Gigabyte OC 4GB Card and an MSI AERO heat sink and fan. I'm currently 3D printing a new shell for it, see below. It's more than capable of running Ventura, Minecraft and yes No Mans Sky runs pretty good and it's Metal 3 compatible. I don't use AMD Adrenalin in my G5 Hack with the Sapphire Pulse RX580 and Windows 11 Pro, I haven't noticed any performance issues without it.

I'm done with Apple, I'm printing my own cube pro.

I do like the yellow grille, wonder why Apple never thought of this!. The piece at the bottom was for the GPU, I planned on replacing the shell with my own but sadly the support was stronger than the fins and it broke, definitely worth revisiting though.

www.tonymacx86.com

 

[etorix]

If MacOS supported the AMD Radeon RX 6400 card, I would have used that on my Mini-ITX Hacks, but no go.

A very weird range of desktop cards build on what was intended as a cheap dGPU for laptops. From what I see, most cards are low profile, but most are still double slot.
What was the requirement to use this one rather than a RX 6600 or a small and cheap Polaris?

 

[trs96]

Maybe we could come up with a more complete list too.

@etorix PDF is attached to post #1 and below. Think I got them all but check it over to see.

Techpowerup says "The Radeon RX 6900 XTX is a graphics card by AMD, that was never released."
What was the reason for that ?

 

[GDS]

highly recommended video to people who want to not make any mistakes on buying new gpu for their hack

I went through a dual gigabyte rx6900 xt (xtxh) watercooled
There was a promotion on amazon japan: 1 new for 700$
Unfortunately I cannot see any results on Geekbench or else to see how metal 3 is managed with a dual GPU (6900or others)

As my main purpose is to use with davinci which is metal 3 optimized, would love to know if I made the right choice before to install all the watercooling stuff on my rig
PUGET systems website made tests on simple and dual GPU on davinci but as it is on windows! Pretty pointless

Thanks

 

[trs96]

There was a promotion on amazon japan: 1 new for 700$
Unfortunately I cannot see any results on Geekbench or else to see how metal 3 is managed with a dual GPU (6900or others)

From what little I've read (I don't buy the highest end GPUs) it looks as if it's a dual slot GPU not a "dual GPU" someone correct me if that's not right. So the performance will not be that much better than a 6900 XT. It's probably just drawing more power to get slightly better performance, hence the need for liquid cooling.

 

[ckrueger99]

How important is Metal 3 compatibility?

 

[trs96]

How important is Metal 3 compatibility?

Nice to have but not essential for the average Mac/hack user. If you wanted to game and port DX12 games on your Sonoma Mac, then it's probably important for you. There are some videos for developers available from Apple you can watch to learn more. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10066/

At the 2022 WWDC, Apple announced the third version of Metal (Metal 3), which has debuted with the release of macOS Ventura, iOS 16 and iPadOS 16. Metal 3 introduces the MetalFX upscaling framework, which renders complex scenes in less time per frame with high-performance upscaling and anti-aliasing.

 

[trs96]

Andrew seems to be a developer well versed on the porting DX12 games topic.

 

[wstrohm]

Isn't the 6400 worse than the RX560?

RX 560 on the left, RX6400 on the right. Screenshots are from my "Mini-ITX 2" Skylake computer (listed below).

What was the requirement to use this one rather than a RX 6600 or a small and cheap Polaris?

Case size. The card has to be single-slot with a single-width backplate. The cases are Apex MI-008 (Mini-ITX 1) and Rosewill RS-MI-01 (Mini-ITX 2).

 

[Michenstein]

I could add the Radeon PRO WX 3200 as a single slot model supported only through fake-id (Radeon PRO WX 4100 device-id=E3670000) also, to give better performance and compatibility to this polaris model it is necessary to add the properties to it attached here.
I have been 3 years with no problems with this model and it is not necessary to use Whatevergreen (it is better not to use this kext to improve compatibility with Metal) It works very well with the SMBIOS of the MacPro7,1 and its native 10 bit support... the connection must being through DisplayPort.