macOS Sierra PB: Need testers for new AMD Radeon drivers!

[Gigamaxx]

So RX460 will work now from OOB or already working but we dont know how its work?

The Gigabyte RX 460 (no 6 pin connector) works by only changing bios to IGPU as primary display. Sapphire may need injection methods.

 

[Fl0r!an]

Actually, no. The card in the new MacBook Pro is the RP 460, not the RX 460.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/amd-radeon-pro-400-series-specs-macbook-pro/

It's just Apples name for a down-clocked "Baffin" chip, not more, not less than that. The RadeonPro 460 is ~10% slower than the RX 460 (despite having 2 more CU's) and doesn't seem to offer any additional features.

 

[Gigamaxx]

So if you have say a X99 system with no iGPU, you have to set everything to automatically boot (ie clover boot loader can only boot straight to OSX?)???

You will need a AMD 4550, or R9 270x to use as a IGPU to get the RX card working. If you use a card that runs native in the PCIE slot 1 and your RX in slot 2 it works.

 

[jerryy2345]

It's just Apples name for a down-clocked "Baffin" chip, not more, not less than that. The RadeonPro 460 is ~10% slower than the RX 460 (despite having 2 more CU's) and doesn't seem to offer any additional features.

ars TECHNICA is claiming it is more than 10% ---

"...which show the Radeon Pro 450 used in the MacBook Pro to have a peak FP32 performance of around one teraflop. That's under half the 2.2 teraflops of the desktop-based RX 460 and miles behind the performance of Nvidia's Pascal-based laptop GPUs."

and

"... the Radeon Pro 450 is likely to perform similarly to the likes of the Radeon HD 7770 and R7 250X, ..."

I am hoping this means the controllers and accelerators are closer to being ready so that things like audio over DP and HDMI will work as expected.

Edit: If you kick in the extra $200 to get the BTO card you get 1.85 teraflops peak vs the RX 460's 2.2 teraflops -- about 16% worse.

 

[plastico]

I did some more tests to my RX 460 (Sapphire OC):


First I thought about what I mentioned in my previous comments that the card is booting when installing macOS Sierra 10.12, but after installing it will fail to boot. What I understood that the card is booting to idle mood as @Gigamaxx mentioned so in a kernel way of talking:


1) From the installation USB, I opened terminal and fired up:

# ioreg | grep AMD

Found that: AMD9500Controller.kext, AMDFramebuffer.kext and AMDSupport.kext loaded.


so now in my rig I have no IntelG or a second PCIe slot to put a helper card alternatively to IntelG so all the mentioned methods above will not fit in my rig.


so I thought about a kind off tricky idea to see if it will work or not without the need of any IntelG or alternative, so the tricks:

From win 10

1) Installed HFS paragon filesystem app.

2) Backed the kext's Up and Removed: AMD9500Controller.kext, AMDFramebuffer.kext and AMDRadeonX4000.kext

3) Removed and Cleared the caches from /S/L/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches.

4) Restart, Then macOS sierra 10.12 booted with 5mb video card.


From macOS Sierra 10.12:

1) I installed all the kext again to the /S/L/E, Except AMDRadeonX4000.kext.

2) Rebooted

3) macOS booted with AMD R9 xxx 2048 MB (Boom )

4) Opened the terminal and fired up:

# ioreg | grep AMD

| | | | +-o AMD9500Controller <class AMD9500Controller, id 0x1000002e2, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 5>

| | | | +-o ATY,AMD,RadeonFramebuffer@0 <class AtiFbStub, id 0x1000002fe, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (5 ms), retain 8>

| | | | | +-o AMDFramebufferVIB <class AMDFramebuffer, id 0x100000301, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (4 ms), retain 16>

| | | | | +-o AMDNDRVService <class AtiAppServices, id 0x100000317, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 6>

| | | | +-o ATY,AMD,RadeonFramebuffer@1 <class AtiFbStub, id 0x1000002ff, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 8>

| | | | | +-o AMDFramebufferVIB <class AMDFramebuffer, id 0x100000307, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 14>

| | | | | +-o AMDNDRVService <class AtiAppServices, id 0x10000031d, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 6>

| | | | +-o ATY,AMD,RadeonFramebuffer@2 <class AtiFbStub, id 0x100000300, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 8>

| | | | | +-o AMDFramebufferVIB <class AMDFramebuffer, id 0x10000030d, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 14>

| | | | | +-o AMDNDRVService <class AtiAppServices, id 0x10000031f, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDSupport <class AMDSupport, id 0x1000002e3, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 5>


5) Installed AMDRadeonX4000
6) In terminal:
#kextload /System/Library/Extensions/AMDRadeonX4000.kext

7) still in terminal :

#kextstat | grep AMD

Results:

com.apple.kext.AMDSupport

com.apple.kext.AMD9500Controller

com.apple.kext.AMDFramebuffer

com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX4000


7) Thought about monitoring SystemInformation:

Before: The card has no metal supported field

Ater: The card has metal supported field


I updated to 10.12.1:


Did all of this again but instead of AMDRadeonX4000 I was playing with AMDRadeonX4100 with the same steps and Terminal results:


#ioreg | grep AMD

| | | | +-o AMD9500Controller <class AMD9500Controller, id 0x1000002d4, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 5>

| | | | +-o ATY,AMD,RadeonFramebuffer@0 <class AtiFbStub, id 0x1000002f9, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (6 ms), retain 8>

| | | | | +-o AMDFramebufferVIB <class AMDFramebuffer, id 0x1000002fc, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (5 ms), retain 17>

| | | | | +-o AMDNDRVService <class AtiAppServices, id 0x10000032c, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 6>

| | | | +-o ATY,AMD,RadeonFramebuffer@1 <class AtiFbStub, id 0x1000002fa, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 8>

| | | | | +-o AMDFramebufferVIB <class AMDFramebuffer, id 0x100000302, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 14>

| | | | | +-o AMDNDRVService <class AtiAppServices, id 0x100000332, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 6>

| | | | +-o ATY,AMD,RadeonFramebuffer@2 <class AtiFbStub, id 0x1000002fb, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 8>

| | | | | +-o AMDFramebufferVIB <class AMDFramebuffer, id 0x100000308, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 14>

| | | | | +-o AMDNDRVService <class AtiAppServices, id 0x100000334, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDSupport <class AMDSupport, id 0x1000002d5, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 5>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDBaffinGraphicsAccelerator <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDBaffinGraphicsAccelerator, id 0x100000483, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 20>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice, id 0x100000484, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient, id 0x100000485, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice, id 0x10000048c, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient, id 0x10000048d, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice, id 0x100000498, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient, id 0x100000499, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice, id 0x1000004b2, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient, id 0x1000004b3, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelDevice, id 0x1000004b9, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>

| | | | +-o AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient <class AMDRadeonX4100_AMDAccelSharedUserClient, id 0x1000004ba, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 6>


# kextstat | grep AMD


94 2 0xffffff7f824e5000 0x14c000 0x14c000 com.apple.kext.AMDSupport (1.4.6) F44047C9-7E55-3B22-AB72-FC07B8E812ED <93 78 12 11 7 5 4 3 1>

95 0 0xffffff7f82679000 0x784000 0x784000 com.apple.kext.AMD9500Controller (1.4.6) 6C3CF6BC-D66D-3361-811F-195A5A91F99C <94 78 12 11 5 4 3 1>

106 0 0xffffff7f82640000 0x25000 0x25000 com.apple.kext.AMDFramebuffer (1.4.6) 4CAE0594-133E-31E6-8F7A-DA3A935DCC03 <94 78 12 11 7 5 4 3 1>

117 0 0xffffff7f83001000 0x830000 0x830000 com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX4100 (1.4.6) 8E0F9CC6-2006-39C4-9AAB-09EB9094FD79 <116 98 78 12 7 5 4 3 1>


I am happy with the results as i started from 0 to at least getting the card booting then at last a baffin result. but now All of this steps did not put the card in acceleration.

so @Fl0r!an @Gigamaxx or @who is kindly interested

Does it mean that the card need to be running under fakeId (not natively support under its ID) to get acceleration by following this method . /or this method will never get the card to accelerate because I load the kext after booting not in early kernel state and of course without restarting and without IGP.

what will happen if one of the successfully running RX 460 card in this topic tried this method ? will it get acceleration ? without the need of any helper card ?

 

[HenryMartens]

The AMD RX 480 works as well and from my testing it runs better benchmarks than the 470. If your looking into doing graphic rendering the RX cards are using 30bit 10,10,10, color versus the 32 bit 8,8,8 scheme from the past. Was able to get a "integrated crossfire" setup using 2 rx cards which doubled my Luxmark score from 12000 to24000. This is future proofing your graphics capabilities if its important to you. For gaming you may want a 980ti, or Titan once Nvidia gets driver's working. RX "*Native support", or Nvidia drivers? Tough call.
If you get an Rx card pick one up that is working for others, there may be some that just can't get support at this time.

Wow man! I have 2 XFX 480's as well. They booted up without any problems. I need to know how to get them accelerated. I don't understand how to enter a KEKT in Clover. I only know how to use KEXT's with KextBeast. Any help would be great. Also, anything on how to get them both crossfiring would be awesome

 

[Gigamaxx]

Wow man! I have 2 XFX 480's as well. They booted up without any problems. I need to know how to get them accelerated. I don't understand how to enter a KEKT in Clover. I only know how to use KEXT's with KextBeast. Any help would be great. Also, anything on how to get them both crossfiring would be awesome

Go to "Enabling RX 4XX Cards in Sierra" on this site. Watch the recommended video and then follow the picture guide. It is fairly easy to do to get started, later you can follow some of the other methods to get past updates without losing your changes. Do you have the latest Sierra? It has much better drivers.

 

[Quickshooter]

Go to "Enabling RX 4XX Cards in Sierra" on this site. Watch the recommended video and then follow the picture guide. It is fairly easy to do to get started, later you can follow some of the other methods to get past updates without losing your changes. Do you have the latest Sierra? It has much better drivers.

By the way, I see you have 17.1 definition for your RX480 build - did you apply AGDPfix.app as well?

 

[Bladeknight]

Does MSI RX 460 2G OC (Mini) work well in Sierra?
Thanks!

 

[sarim]

It's just Apples name for a down-clocked "Baffin" chip, not more, not less than that. The RadeonPro 460 is ~10% slower than the RX 460 (despite having 2 more CU's) and doesn't seem to offer any additional features.

So if apple is using RP 450,455,460 for their laptops, why support for 470 and 480 is in the code? Probably 470/480 will be used in future mac pro machines? Lame move from apple IMO, look at razer, they are putting desktop grade 1080 blade pro where apple is using lower end hardwares with premium price tag.