General Graphics Card Question

[slim.jim]

@slim.jim

Yes, I know. I also know it's supposed to be possible, and others have made it work. But it just isn't working for me right now. In fact this card seems to be an edge case... it has really been a hassle every time I've gone to upgrade OS X or MacOS. So I'm switching it out.

At this point it is best to abandon Nvidia if macOS is your primary OS on your hackintosh. I held out for years and finally gave up on my GTX 970 this year and went with a 5700 XT. It has its occasional issues too but at least I can run a recent version of macOS which was the bigger issue I was encountering.

 

[AnneOminous]

@slim.jim

Yep. I've already bitten the bullet and ordered an RX Vega 64.

Not top of the line, but should be good enough for my purposes and no struggle to drive 3 monitors. Certainly better performance than the old 2GB 680 anyway.

I look forward to fewer hackintosh hassles.

 

[jaymonkey]

I've already bitten the bullet and ordered an RX Vega 64 ... Not top of the line, but should be good enough for my purposes.

@AnneOminous,

The Vega 64 is still a very powerful card in MacOS ... in compute performance (which MacOS is optimised for) it will in most cases beat the 5700 XT due to having more compute units (CU's) ... Having said that Navi based GPU's are much more power efficient than Vega GPU's and the new Navi RDNA architecture pulls more compute performance from each CU (up by ~14% according to AMD).

The Vega 64 has 64 CU's resulting in a FP32 (float) performance of 12.66 TFLOPS.
The Navi 7500 XT has 40 CU's resulting in a FP32 (float) performance 9.754 TFLOPS

The only thing you need to watch out for is to make sure that your PSU is up to task ... for a Vega 64 AMD recommend at least a 600W PSU, on my Z97 system (i7 4790K all core O/C @ 4.8Ghz) with a Vega 64 (Liquid Cooled Edition) I have a Corsair RM 750x PSU and have never had any issues.

Some users with 500W PSU's have reported GPU issues that where resolved once they installed a more powerful PSU.

Before installing your new Vega 64 make sure that Lilu + WhatEverGreen are installed and up-to-date.

Cheers
Jay

 

[AnneOminous]

@jaymonkey

My PSU is 1000W. I got a beefy one because I have 4 x 4TB HDDs. Thinking about getting #5 now.

Regardless, I have a new problem.

My RX Vega 64 is installed and working great in Mojave. All I needed to do was remove Cuda drivers.

But Catalina install stops now right after I tell Clover to boot from the USB. Some kind of board ID or SMBIOS check. It says "Catalina is not supported on this system. Reason: Mac-F221BEC8."

Which is telling Catalina that this is a Mac Pro 5,1 (from 2010?).

My motherboard is as shown in the sidebar. 2014, I think is when I bought it. i7 4790k.

So how do I bypass this SMBIOS check or whatever it is? Boot args were "-v -x -s -no-zp".

(Edit: I looked up the i7 4790k and it was released in June '14 so it was late 2014 when I built this.)

I didn't know about -no_compat_check. I'll try using that.

 

[jaymonkey]

@AnneOminous,

Glad that you made the transition to a AMD Vega 64 .. it's a great GPU for MacOS and I am sure you will be very happy with its performance.

On my Haswell i7 4790K system (see the White Knight system spec in my Signature) I use the iMac15,1 SMBIOS which is the best match for a high end Haswell based system IMO.

It is configured with the IGPU enabled in the BIOS and configured as Headless. I have no issues with MacOs updates or installs using the iMac15,1 SMBIOS and am currently running Catalina 10.15.5 with the latest supplemental update. I use the system mainly as a Digital Audio Workstation running Logic Pro X and for editing video with FCPX and I can tell you that it is rock solid.

I have also tested it with the iMacPro1,1 SMBIOS which works well with no issues at all but I prefer to use the iMac15,1 SMBIOS so as to have Intel Quick Sync support.

Cheers
Jay

 

[AnneOminous]

@jaymonkey

Okay, you lost me.

I don't know how to set the SMBIOS to 15,1. I'm just trying to do a fresh install of Catalina, using vanilla unibeast method and so far I have not been able to get it to boot to the language selection screen.

Do you mean you set it manually in the Clover options?

BTW, currently the Clover options show 6,1 not the 5,1 Catalina is trying to tell me.

Again, my first concern is just getting it to boot into the setup screen. So far I haven't managed that.

Update:

It was freezing at first at the part where the apfs driver is trying to load; I realized that the only bootable SSD was on the secondary PCIE controller chipset, which makes MacOS see it as an "external" disk.

So that's one problem knocked down. Soldiering on...

Are you saying I need to edit config.plist in the install USB drive, before I can even get to the OS install screen? There's no way I could have known that in advance.

 

[AnneOminous]

@jaymonkey

Any insight here would sure be appreciated.

I've attached the config.plist from the Unibeast Catalina install USB. For whatever reason, it says iMac14,2 and injects Nvidiaweb, near the bottom.

 

[jaymonkey]

Any insight here would sure be appreciated.

@AnneOminous,

The iMac14,2 SMBIOS is optimised for a Haswell CPU + Nvidia GPU where as the iMac15,1 SMBIOS is optimised for a Haswell CPU (specifically the i7 4790K) + AMD GPU.

You should remove all Nvidia Injections and parameters from your config.plist.
Configuring a IGPU as Headless and selecting the SMBIOS type is covered in the Lilu + Plug-in's guide :-

An iDiot's Guide To Lilu and its Plug-ins

An iDiot's Guide To Lilu and its Plug-in's Last Update: 22nd Jan 2021 (Add note about OpenCore config.plist modifications) About this Guide Note: This guide was written when Clover was the boot loader of choice as such the config.plist examples in this guide are mostley Clover specific ... if...

www.tonymacx86.com

Cheers
Jay

 

[AnneOminous]

Cool, thanks. I'll back up the existing (i.e., auto-generated) one and modify it.

 

[AnneOminous]

@jaymonkey

Hmm.

I managed to get my current Mojave install running with iMac15,1 + PEG and multi-monitor turned on in the BIOS. It seems to be working just fine.

But trying to install Catalina that way still stalled at the point where it normally loads the graphical language select screen.

Args used are -v -no_compat_check kext-dev-mode=1

Intel graphics is injected.