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Problem with poor Vega 64 Performance on Mojave 10.14.5

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Thanks. I took a look at the bios. The PCIe was set for "auto" so I forced it to Gen3. iGPU is enabled, and headless. (This build is for video work, and I want to be able to access H264.)

No change in performance.

When/if you have the time to look closer at my EFI, you mentioned things that might be cleaned up a bit. I'd be happy to learn what they are, and set things up to be as pristine as possible.

Thanks in Advance!

Hi @kentval

Doing some research on your board, it seems that there's conflicting information, with the majority of the opinions being that it doesn't support NVRAM (although this shouldn't have anything to do with your Vega 64 perf issues...even if it's running at 8x)

However, having ROG ASUS boards in the past, sometimes ASUS actually removes NVRAM support even if the initial BIOS had it (they are weird like that)...but in the meantime, with this attached EFI, we are going to try to see if the latest BIOS for your board does indeed have native NVRAM.

But for now since we're here, let's clean up your EFI a bit and test.

I have removed emuvariableuefi and OsxAptioFix for now. Please make sure you have the latest BIOS and a backup of your current EFI before trying this (And having the ability to boot to restore if you have boot issues).

Have also cleaned up some redundant entries in config file, updated Clover/Kexts/Drivers to latest versions as well as modified the way iGPU is injected in platform entries. But you may experiment that one on your end since you are going headless. If your previous iGPU entries were working better, please delete the current ones in there and put your old one back in.

Also have left your USB SSDT alone, since it's custom. I personally prefer USB kexts, but it's up to you.

Let me know how this works out, but overall, you should see 200k in GeekBench 3 for OpenCL with Vega 64...and Luxmark should be about 30-31k.

Also try VideoProc to see if H264/H265 is fully enabled.

As far as BIOS settings, there should be a bunch of threads about your board and BIOS settings, but leaving PCIe to "Auto" [default] should suffice as modern BIOS auto detects these boards without issues.
 

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  • kentval_EFI.zip
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Thank you. However, I have also just got a reply directly from Slice, (who appears to be part of development on Clover, on the SourceForge.net ticket area. Here's the whole thread, which was started by me regarding a shutdown issue, but in the replies, this interesting information has come out:

"... this is because we have no support for hardware NVRAM on 390 motherboards."
and
"You have to add EmuVariableUefi to have an emulated NVRAM. No other workaround exists.
Fix3 or Fix2 doesn't matter."

My reading of this is that the confusion here about hardware NVRAM actually stems from the fact that Clover doesn't support it in 390 boards. (FWIW, the ASUS site specifies that my mobo -does- have NVRAM.)

I did try a non-emulated version of Clover when I very first built this rig, and it would not work, exactly as Slice noted.

I'd like to get your comments on this before go much further will the non-emulated test (which, as I say, failed the first time.)

OH: what version of Clover did you build this from? I'm using 4961

-----

Luxmark is 29800 and openCL is 158,000-ish
 
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Thank you. However, I have also just got a reply directly from Slice, (who appears to be part of development on Clover, on the SourceForge.net ticket area. Here's the whole thread, which was started by me regarding a shutdown issue, but in the replies, this interesting information has come out:

"... this is because we have no support for hardware NVRAM on 390 motherboards."
and
"You have to add EmuVariableUefi to have an emulated NVRAM. No other workaround exists.
Fix3 or Fix2 doesn't matter."

My reading of this is that the confusion here about hardware NVRAM actually stems from the fact that Clover doesn't support it in 390 boards. (FWIW, the ASUS site specifies that my mobo -does- have NVRAM.)

I did try a non-emulated version of Clover when I very first built this rig, and it would not work, exactly as Slice noted.

I'd like to get your comments on this before go much further will the non-emulated test (which, as I say, failed the first time.)

OH: what version of Clover did you build this from? I'm using 4961

-----

Luxmark is 29800 and openCL is 158,000-ish

Ok add EmuVariableUefi in the drivers folder and you should be able to boot with no issues, then. No big deal. You’re not going to lose performance with lack of NVRAM.

Clover is latest from about a few days ago. I believe there’s newer builds but it’s only minor updates. Shouldn’t make a difference.

Luxmark score seems ok-ish but geekbench is off. I think GB3 is bugged.

Can you do some other benchmarks like Valley and Cinebench 15 for the gpu? Or even some modern games on macOS. If the performance is close to Windows it’s fine. If not something else is wrong.
 
Cinebench 15 is showing 122 fps. (I can't run GB3: it just reboots my machine, so that's GB4.) Valley shows 90 fps, HQ, on a 2560x1440 monitor.
I did make some, but not all, of the changes you posted. (Thanks again.) One I did not make was what looks to me like a swap of GFX0 to IGPU and PEGP to GFX0. I didn't understand why you did that, and given that we have different mobos... well, I just decided to skip it. Bad move, or OK?

Finally, it seems that the Vega vs 10.14.5 affects "real" Macs too, and the problem apparently lies with Apple, I'm just going to live with it (like everyone else) and wait for an Apple fix.

I learned a lot while chasing this down, however, and my thanks to you once again.
 
@movolans Would you mind sharing your EFI and BIOS settings for the Z390 Designare + Vega64 Nitro+, as you claim to have normal BruceX performance (11-12sec) with 10.14.5?

I'm running an identical setup, and some weeks before I had a 10.14.5 working quite well at around 12 secs, but in the meantime messed it up. Trying to start clean now, but I can't get any better than 16 seconds.

SMBIOS iMac19,1 seems to work better than iMacPro1,1.

I also followed the advice of removing NVME drives as I was getting 20sec+ performance. Now running off a SATA SSD and no other devices than just Vega64 and normal onboard stuff enabled (incl. TB3), the performance is slightly better.

As a quick question as well: How do you exactly count BruceX FCPX performance in time? I Do we start the timer when we hit "Save" or do we start the timer when we hear the GPU start (coilwhile and whatnot)? Do we stop the timer when the coloured pictogram of the file shows up on the desktop, or when QuickTime actually shows the file? There's a few seconds of difference in all these options.

I mean to say, if I'm really optimistic I could claim ca. 12 seconds, but it doesn't feel like I'm counting the whole process then.

As far as I understand now, with either SMBIOS one doesn't need to provide Device Properties or ACPI patches, as Whatevergreen should take care of this?


PS: If people report that they have good performance in 10.14.3, but it changes in 10.14.5, you can exclude any hardware intereference, like sharing of PCI-E bandwidth. This is all defined on a low level in the BIOS, rather than by the OS.
 

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  • EFI.zip
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As a quick question as well: How do you exactly count BruceX FCPX performance in time? I Do we start the timer when we hit "Save" or do we start the timer when we hear the GPU start (coilwhile and whatnot)? Do we stop the timer when the coloured pictogram of the file shows up on the desktop, or when QuickTime actually shows the file? There's a few seconds of difference in all these options.

I start counting the second I click "Save".
 
And stopping after QuickTime loads with file have nothing with encoding time! Surely, after progress bar finishes.
 
I get exactly 12 seconds as well. What cooler are you using with your 9900k ok'd pastrychef?

I use a Noctua NH-D15S. I also delidded my i9-9900K myself. Full details are here.
 
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