First steps with a MSI Radeon VII under macOS 10.14.3 (18D42) and 10.14.3 SU (18D109)
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Today, I encountered a unique opportunity to perform some dirty first steps and tests with a MSI Radeon VII under macOS 10.14.3 (18D42) and macOS 10.14.3 SU (18D109) on a friend's system here in Berlin.
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1.) The first disappointing discovery independent from macOS was that this GPU for now apparently seems not compatible with UEFI. The BIOS enforced "CSM" by default otherwise the ASUS Prime X299 Deluxe system would not have booted at all.
2.) Once under macOS 10.14.3, the Radeon VII was rather recognised by macOS like a Vega Frontier at first place, with only one DP1.4 port actually natively working.
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3.) After applying just some cosmetics to
SSDT-X299-Vega64.aml and implementing the latter in line with Whatevergreen.kext, the Radeon VII appeared under "About this Mac" such:
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Thanks to
SSDT-X299-Radeon-VII.aml (which is basically
SSDT-X299-Vega64.aml), Radeon VII and Radeon VII HD-Audio PCI drivers also correctly popped-up in Section "PCI" of Apple's system Report as properly implemented and fully loaded:
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In combination with Whatevergreen.kext, the three DP1.4 ports and the single HDMI port of the MSI Radeon VII also have been properly implemented in form of just four Radeon frame buffers + the respective HDAU device.
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All four ports were fully functional, including display HotPlug and multi-monitor support. Also sleep/wake worked absolutely flawless.
The UI worked fluid without an issues or lag and also video playback fully worked as expected.
Now the bad news at least for macOS 10.14.3 (18D42) and macOS 10.14.3 SU (18D109):
All benchmark tools available, i.e. Cinebench OpenGL, Geekbench OpenGL and Metal, LuXMark OpenGL or Heaven and Valley were not able to find any GPU supporting OpenGL or Metal.
Thus, unfortunately under the above mentioned macOS versions, the Radeon VII seems yet not to support OpenGL or Metal so far.
Thought that this recent findings also might be interesting for others ..
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