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

[TheMop]

Hi Milluco (et al). I just wanted to put a follow up post to say, DP is working a dream, I'm currently trying to get the most of my system and thought I'd put a shout out to see if anyone had any ideas. My main concern is that in Hackintool it states that 'VDA decoder failed'. Is that something I should concern myself with? I will be doing light/moderate video editing on here so keen to get everything working as well as it can be. I've also been trying to get my head round a 'headless' set up as I'd like my system to put as much strain on the GPU as it can...! Will an appropriate SMBIOS help this out?

If useful here are some benchmarks:
Geekbench 5 Compute Metal / OpenCL: 53,522/47,550
Cinebench R23: 6,125
Unigine Valley: 1,982

Thanks again for your advice so far

 

[miliuco]

Hi Milluco (et al). I just wanted to put a follow up post to say, DP is working a dream, I'm currently trying to get the most of my system and thought I'd put a shout out to see if anyone had any ideas. My main concern is that in Hackintool it states that 'VDA decoder failed'...

The dPGU works well in view of the benchmark results. But macOS wants to use the iGPU as an accessory card for video encoding tasks. To do this, it must be well recognized by macOS.
You can upload your config.plist file here to see what code you use or what code needs to be added.

 

[TheMop]

Good to know That would be great if you don't mind!
I've managed to get Apple TV working, which I think is tied to the hardware accel...? As I'm sure you'll also see, I have a failed attempt at the foxbox frame buffer in there for good measure....lol.

 

[TheMop]

Hi @miliuco, I hope you had a good xmas&new year...! I wondered if I could pick your brains (hopefully) one last time..?
I’ve been working at getting the VDA encoder to work (along with Apple TV etc). It is now all looking good.
in that process (to get round an incompatible headless SMBIOS that was recommended in the WEG guide that brick walled my system) I’ve set my Mac to iMac Pro 1,1. This has put all of the gfx stress on the GPU which is what I was hoping for due to my older CPU.

My question is, despite the fact that the load is being put on the GPU, my geek bench 5 scores have plummeted from ~50,000 to about 32,000 in both Metal and OpenCL.
Am I better to have an SMBIOS of something like yours (19,1) for higher scores, or do you think overall I would be better sticking to a set up that leans totally on my GPU?
Sorry if this is a daft question...!
Best,
Sam

 

[miliuco]

Hi @miliuco, I hope you had a good xmas&new year...! I wondered if I could pick your brains (hopefully) one last time..?
I’ve been working at getting the VDA encoder to work (along with Apple TV etc). It is now all looking good.
in that process (to get round an incompatible headless SMBIOS that was recommended in the WEG guide that brick walled my system) I’ve set my Mac to iMac Pro 1,1. This has put all of the gfx stress on the GPU which is what I was hoping for due to my older CPU.

My question is, despite the fact that the load is being put on the GPU, my geek bench 5 scores have plummeted from ~50,000 to about 32,000 in both Metal and OpenCL.
Am I better to have an SMBIOS of something like yours (19,1) for higher scores, or do you think overall I would be better sticking to a set up that leans totally on my GPU?
Sorry if this is a daft question...!
Best,
Sam

I don't know whether to value those GeekBench 5 scores because, in my case, I also get a clearly lower value with iMacPro compared to iMac:

• iMac19.1: 50000
• iMacPro1,1: 36000.

However the system and applications seem to work the same in both situations. I do not know the exact cause of this lower score in one model than in another. But from what I see in the forums and from what you say it is common.

Happy new year to you too.

 

[mvonbodun]

I have a 2009 Mac Pro and have upgraded the CPU to a 5690, upgraded the RAM to 48GB and the graphics card to an AMD RX 580 with 8GB. The RX 580 was purchased through MacVidCards and has the firmware updated to support seeing output during boot. My son uses this computer to play Minecraft. He has found that he really can't get the FPS above 60 FPS (VSync is turned on). Most of the time it is around 25 to 30 FPS and he really has most of the video effects turned down in Minecraft. If he turns VSync off, the FPS goes up, but he gets glitchy video and it isn't usable to game. As an experiment, we installed Windows on a separate hard drive on the Mac, installed Minecraft, and now he seems to be fully able to utilize the RX 580 - frame rates cross 300 and 400 FPS sometimes and he can record at 1080P. The OS level is Mojave. Do you have any suggestions why Mac OS X doesn't seem to be able to drive the video card better than Windows 10?

 

[miliuco]

I have a 2009 Mac Pro and have upgraded the CPU to a 5690, upgraded the RAM to 48GB and the graphics card to an AMD RX 580 with 8GB. The RX 580 was purchased through MacVidCards and has the firmware updated to support seeing output during boot. My son uses this computer to play Minecraft. He has found that he really can't get the FPS above 60 FPS (VSync is turned on). Most of the time it is around 25 to 30 FPS and he really has most of the video effects turned down in Minecraft. If he turns VSync off, the FPS goes up, but he gets glitchy video and it isn't usable to game. As an experiment, we installed Windows on a separate hard drive on the Mac, installed Minecraft, and now he seems to be fully able to utilize the RX 580 - frame rates cross 300 and 400 FPS sometimes and he can record at 1080P. The OS level is Mojave. Do you have any suggestions why Mac OS X doesn't seem to be able to drive the video card better than Windows 10?

You are talking about a real Mac. I cannot speak with experience about it. But it is clear that in your Mac Pro the difference in performance of the Radeon card between macOS and Windows is too big.
In my hackintosh I have 2 disks, one with Big Sur and the other with Windows 10. The graphics card behaves very similarly on both systems. In Windows there is an increase in performance, probably due to the AMD drivers that provide a large number of functions and settings, but this increase is small.
I will run the same graphical benchmark on both operating systems and tell you the results.
Edit:
I have tried Unigine Heaven 4 which has version for macOS and Windows. The scores have been very similar, around 90-110 FPS on a regular basis. Min FPS 70 and max FPS 160. The difference between both systems has been very small, practically non-existent.