Radeon Compatibility Guide - ATI/AMD Graphics Cards

[Fl0r!an]

My R9 280 is working fine both with Inject / Ati = True & FBName=Hamachi as well as Inject / Ati = False.

 

[tallrob]

I'd look for a different model. XFX cards with that port layout are known to be troublesome (usually KP at boot), so I don't have a good feeling about that Club3D model.

Good news though: HD 7950 cards (as well as HD 7970/R9 280/R9 280X) can easily be flashed for boot screens, and the sleep/wake issue doesn't exist on real Mac Pros either! Just to be sure to use at least OS X 10.8, otherwise you won't have drivers.

So I took a chance because no alternative came up, and the card seems to function just fine, no problems on boot. I am, however, not overwhelmed by the improvement over the 5770 I had previously installed. I ran a few benchmarks and wasn't impressed. Geek bench scores actually went down. Oceanwaves had a 1fps increase. Etc Etc

I'm running 10.10.5 on a Mac Pro 1,1 with upgraded dual X5355 CPUs, 24GB ram. Should I not expect some increase in performance in FCP and Aperture going from a 5770 to 7950? Could there be something wrong with this card, or is there a bottleneck somewhere else in my system?

Thanks,
Rob

 

[Fl0r!an]

You should see a massive improvement in compute benchmarks, e.g. Luxmark. Same goes for FCPX benchmarks like BruceX.

Graphics benchmarks are often bottlenecked by the single thread CPU performance, so slow CPUs with lots of cores (like old Mac Pros) will often underperform.

 

[tallrob]

You should see a massive improvement in compute benchmarks, e.g. Luxmark. Same goes for FCPX benchmarks like BruceX.

Graphics benchmarks are often bottlenecked by the single thread CPU performance, so slow CPUs with lots of cores (like old Mac Pros) will often underperform.

Ok that makes sense. How should that translate to the real world in FCPX and photo editing apps like Capture One that uses OpenCL? They should speed up using multiple cores, right?

 

[Fl0r!an]

Yes, you should usually see a speed up in functions which are OpenCL enabled.

It's a good idea to use a synthetic benchmark like Luxmark to verify that your GPU is working fine though.

 

[Yaroslavl]

Hi!

my pc:
GB Z170n WIFI
i3 6320
RAM 16 gb kingston fury
ssd samsung 850 evo 120gb
video ATI Gigabyte HD 6850 1gb

I I'm facing a little problem with installation Sierra on my computer using this guide. After boot from clover to mac os installer every time my monitor switch off in the middle of the progress bar and never turn on again until reboot. I tried different variations of Boot Flags (GraphicsEnabler, npci, PCIRootUID, Mode, -v, -x and others) but nothing changes.

My monitor is pretty old so i use DVI-I -> VGA adapter

But when i unplug HD6850 and use my integrated graphics (intel 530) with my wife's monitor with DVI-D everything works great, boot leads me to installation wizard and nothing goes wrong.

But i want to use my HD6850 and I'm definitely don't want to use my wife's monitor (she'll be mad).

What do i do wrong with my configuration? Any ideas appreciated, thanks.

 

[Fl0r!an]

Which SMBIOS are you using? Try iMac14,2.

 

[tallrob]

Yes, you should usually see a speed up in functions which are OpenCL enabled.

It's a good idea to use a synthetic benchmark like Luxmark to verify that your GPU is working fine though.

I think there's something not quite right with this 7950. After getting bad benchmark numbers I removed it yesterday to run more comparisons with the 5770. Then I put it back in again and it was totally dead. I could get to the login screen via VNC and checked the hardware report. Nothing detected in the PCIe slot. Reseated and checked power connections, still nothing. Reinstalled the 5770 in the same slot and tried both power cables and everything worked fine.

So today I tried the 7950 one more time. Shockingly it booted fine and so I ran the benchmarks again. Luxmark shot up to 1669 from 404, Geekbench is back to previous scores, Heaven fps up 3X, and Oceanwave finally showed some real scores once I found out you need to drag another window over the test if it's stuck at ~60fps due to a vsync bug.

Anyway I'll just move forward with caution, but I might find a backup card just in case. Thanks for all your help.

 

[RandomTech]

Can someone advise me an powerfull ati gpu which works oodb without any framebuffer changes etc and can be comparred with the 980 TI/ Titan ?

For (Hardcore Gaming) on OS X no any, but for OpenCL or Metal video rendering my tested HD 7950 and tested HD 7970 each is much faster than my tested GTX 980Ti, by a lot.. Tested Apps are Adobe Premier 2017, FCP X and DaVinci Resolve.

BTW, Cinebench 15 OpenGL also my HD 7970 scores faster with 131 fps wheres my GTX 980Ti 129 fps, HD 7950 scores 125 fps.

So as I am not asking OS X to do hardcore game for me, then the HD 7970/50 are much faster than GTX 980Ti/Titan for OS X imo, not mentioning that buggy Nvidia Web Driver.

Edit: GTX 980Ti 129 fps was done on El Capitan, new GTX 980Ti score on Sierra 10.12 is 107 fps, MSI HD 7970 Lightning still 131 fps and MSI HD 7950 score 125 fps.. So yeah, I do confirm there is AMD barely outdated cards which is faster than GTX 980Ti/Titan on Hackintosh and works natively.

 

[djsprat]

I have the GTX 750ti NVIDIA graphics on my CustoMac. From what I am reading and investigating, this is not going to function well with Sierra. It is working at the moment. When I say working, I mean that the computer boots and I can use the computer. Unfortunately, the drivers are not loading so that I end up with poor resolution and this will never do as a machine to edit photographs. My knee-jerk reaction is to get a different video card. I was thinking of the AMD Radeon R9 290x which was contemporary to the i7 processor that I was using. If you have any recommendations for getting my current card to work or which card I should buy in order to get decent graphics performance, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.