Contribute
Register

[Success] AMD RX6000 Series working in macOS

I seem to remember that 5700xt drivers didn't appear until 10.15.3.

I suspect it's not Apple dragging its feet, but rather AMD who has a pretty shoddy history with drivers.
 
Looking for a bit of advice. I’ve been buying Macs for 20 years but in 2018 I decided to build a Hack to get more performance for my money. I wasn’t wrong, the machine is still a great workhorse. But I’m stuck on High Sierra and the new versions of apps I use daily are almost all incompatible (Davinci, AE, PP, Blender). I’m starting to feel the pinch.

When I built the hack using a Nvidia GPU (GTX 1080 Ti FTW3) I knew this day would come and was excited when these new AMD GPU’s became a potential replacement to the 1080 I use. As many others on here, I firmly believe these 6000 cards will be supported in MacOS, eventually.

The other day I managed to (impulse) snag a Sapphire 6900 XT, but at a huge cost £1200. I am now trying to decide if I should cancel the order and go for a standard 6800 instead. Reasons being; these are currently around £700; additional performance for editing, etc. seems marginal compared to the 6900 XT from tests on editing apps I’ve come across. These cards are after all geared towards gaming. Essentially, I just need more VRAM than a 5000 series would offer. I have considered a second hand Radeon VII.

With Apple’s new in-house silicon roadmap, I’m certainly going to shift back to buying native Macs. I’ll wait for their new Mac Pro, which is expect will be a late 2022 launch, so I need a stop gap to get my current machine running Big Sur with similar performance I get from the 1080.

While I appreciate it’s impossible to predict how a 6800 –with the first round of drivers and software support– may perform on MacOS and also how it would compare to the 6900 XT, considering there will be more VRAM to play with vs. a 1080 I would imagine I could expect at least equivalent performance to the 1080 for my use? So should I just grab a 6800 instead?
 
@jb-uk The only detailed benchmark we have with regards to video editing - to my knowledge anyway - is the recent Puget Systems benchmark on DaVinci Resolve. You can find their 6900XT summary here: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...udio---AMD-Radeon-RX-6900-XT-Performance-2032

Conclusion: On Windows, AMD GPUs are still very much lagging behind NVidia for video editing / VFX. The 6900XT is slightly outperformed by an NVidia 3060Ti, and significantly outperformed by the 3080.

That's not great reading for us using AMD cards for Hackintosh support. However, there is one possible caveat: those tests were done on Windows. Therefore they were not only comparing AMD vs NVidia, they were also comparing OpenCL vs CUDA. DaVinci Resolve does not make use of AMD's improved Vulkan compute engine, only OpenCL.

It's well known that CUDA is miles ahead of OpenCL as a compute API. This could certainly account for some of the difference. In other words, it's possible that the weaker OpenCL API is not making the full use of the AMD GPU, iwhereas the CUDA API will definitely be making good use of the NVidia GPU.

On macOS, we have Metal, Apple's own compute API. It's much newer than CUDA, but I believe the general consensus is that it could be a rival to CUDA. Certainly Apple want it to be.

So, would those AMD GPUs perform better in macOS using Metal than Puget found in Windows using OpenCL? Probably. But I have no idea whether it would be by a significant amount, and of course we have no way to do any kind of testing until the drivers are out.

In summary:
  1. If cost is a factor, the 6900XT is not a good deal. Especially at £1200. If you want the absolute best performing single GPU available for Hackintosh, then it's that. But if you're looking at price v performance, the 6800 or 6800XT is a better bet. Probably the 6800XT is the sweet spot.
    1. You could even look at getting 2 x 6800 for £1400 -£1500, and that would blow 1 x 6900XT out of the water in apps that can make use of two GPUs, like DaVinci Resolve.
  2. I would think that any of the AMD GPUs will beat your 1080Ti - but I don't know by how much. We can see in the Puget scores that the 6900XT is about 20% behind the 2080Ti in the GPU score, and I believe the 2080Ti was around 30% faster than the 1080Ti overall. That'd put the 6900XT a little way ahead of the 1080Ti on Windows. Hopefully further ahead on macOS with Metal, but we can't yet be certain. The 6800 might be on a par with the 1080Ti in Windows, but hopefully will perform better with Metal.
  3. If cost isn't a huge deal to you, then the fact that you have a 6900XT on its way might be significant, given the low stock availability. 6800s have been easier to get than 6800XTs so if you did got that way you could probably get one - or certainly if you paid around £800 from eBay. But unless you're certain you can get your hands on a card, a card in the hand is worth something in these days of crazy demand and nearly nonexistant supply.
 
Looking for a bit of advice. I’ve been buying Macs for 20 years but in 2018 I decided to build a Hack to get more performance for my money. I wasn’t wrong, the machine is still a great workhorse. But I’m stuck on High Sierra and the new versions of apps I use daily are almost all incompatible (Davinci, AE, PP, Blender). I’m starting to feel the pinch.

When I built the hack using a Nvidia GPU (GTX 1080 Ti FTW3) I knew this day would come and was excited when these new AMD GPU’s became a potential replacement to the 1080 I use. As many others on here, I firmly believe these 6000 cards will be supported in MacOS, eventually.

The other day I managed to (impulse) snag a Sapphire 6900 XT, but at a huge cost £1200. I am now trying to decide if I should cancel the order and go for a standard 6800 instead. Reasons being; these are currently around £700; additional performance for editing, etc. seems marginal compared to the 6900 XT from tests on editing apps I’ve come across. These cards are after all geared towards gaming. Essentially, I just need more VRAM than a 5000 series would offer. I have considered a second hand Radeon VII.

With Apple’s new in-house silicon roadmap, I’m certainly going to shift back to buying native Macs. I’ll wait for their new Mac Pro, which is expect will be a late 2022 launch, so I need a stop gap to get my current machine running Big Sur with similar performance I get from the 1080.

While I appreciate it’s impossible to predict how a 6800 –with the first round of drivers and software support– may perform on MacOS and also how it would compare to the 6900 XT, considering there will be more VRAM to play with vs. a 1080 I would imagine I could expect at least equivalent performance to the 1080 for my use? So should I just grab a 6800 instead?
EDIT - If you are quick nab a 6800....


Loads of stock got XTs too


Hi mate,

So I have a 6900xt and use Resolve, Premiere, AE and C4d mostly. As the poster above said we need to wait for MacOS compatibility to gauge how good the card will be.

However I have been using it in Windows and it is pretty zippy compared to my Vega64 in MacOS. Having said that I don't get any benefit in Media Encoder for example so I guess my 3950x is doing the heavy lifting. I tested a Realflow simulation and it was very impressive though in GPU mode.

I paid £1080 for mine and just like you it was an impulse buy based on how rare they are. I wouldn't recommend the card until full support is ready in macOS as having a Windows system is completely messing up my workflow(and head), I have switched back to my Vega 64 Hackintosh machine for now.

I expect the 6800 is a way better buy looking at benchmarks and pricing but for me money was not a massive issue as it is a business expense. I would say an RX 580 would be the best buy at the minute, I picked one up for £150 before Christmas and it will work out the box with any macOS. Might be worth doing that so you can get your system up to date.
 
Last edited:
On windows davinci resolve with 6800 XT I'm getting fever as its so unstable, I felt like working on my old laptop with gtx860m was much better. Free or studio version worked same as bad. Project loading takes forever. And I'm only on SSD's I dont know whats the cause but its painful when project crashes and then crashes on startup with my specs (i9-10850k, rx 6800xt, 32gb ram and bunch of free ssd space). Also version doesnt matter , 16 or 17 beta - same problems.
 
On windows davinci resolve with 6800 XT I'm getting fever as its so unstable, I felt like working on my old laptop with gtx860m was much better. Free or studio version worked same as bad. Project loading takes forever. And I'm only on SSD's I dont know whats the cause but its painful when project crashes and then crashes on startup with my specs (i9-10850k, rx 6800xt, 32gb ram and bunch of free ssd space). Also version doesnt matter , 16 or 17 beta - same problems.
I only briefly tested some 6k red and playback was snappy, not worked properly in it yet though so can't comment on stability.
 
Cheers fellas. The 6900XT is on the way so I’ll stick with it for now. I probably should have been more patient and waited for full MacOS support. The supply issues seem to be getting resolved somewhat now as well.

@jb-uk The only detailed benchmark we have with regards to video editing - to my knowledge anyway - is the recent Puget Systems benchmark on DaVinci Resolve. You can find their 6900XT summary here: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...udio---AMD-Radeon-RX-6900-XT-Performance-2032
Thanks, I did come across that. Those Davinci engineers seem to do a sterling job with the MacOS builds, so hopefully we'll see some great performance with these cards on Metal. 16 is very stable for me on my 10.13 hack, but I'm itching to use 17.

It's well known that CUDA is miles ahead of OpenCL as a compute API.
Yeah, it's so annoying. I'd happily stick with Nvidia.

You could even look at getting 2 x 6800 for £1400 -£1500, and that would blow 1 x 6900XT out of the water in apps that can make use of two GPUs, like DaVinci Resolve.
That would certainly be a killer setup for Davinci and also for rendering in Blender.

EDIT - If you are quick nab a 6800....


Loads of stock got XTs too
Yeah, looks like Overclockers still have 6900’s and some OC 6800’s in stock if anyone’s interested (UK shipping only). Btw. nice one for getting one at that price.
 
Still nothing in the latest 11.2 RC2
 
EDIT - If you are quick nab a 6800....

Thanks for that link! I already had a reference MSI 6800 but I’ve just bought the Sapphire Nitro+ 6800 and sold my MSI on eBay. I didn’t realise the Sapphire lacked a USB-C port though which is a shame as I had plans for it. Also it needs 750 watts so I’ve had to upgrade my PSU too. Why is nothing ever easy/cheap?! :lol:
 
Cheers fellas. The 6900XT is on the way so I’ll stick with it for now. I probably should have been more patient and waited for full MacOS support. The supply issues seem to be getting resolved somewhat now as well.


Thanks, I did come across that. Those Davinci engineers seem to do a sterling job with the MacOS builds, so hopefully we'll see some great performance with these cards on Metal. 16 is very stable for me on my 10.13 hack, but I'm itching to use 17.


Yeah, it's so annoying. I'd happily stick with Nvidia.


That would certainly be a killer setup for Davinci and also for rendering in Blender.


Yeah, looks like Overclockers still have 6900’s and some OC 6800’s in stock if anyone’s interested (UK shipping only). Btw. nice one for getting one at that price.
I'm with you but paid $1900 AUD for mine! Again, lessens the blow being a business expense. Waiting for support first would have been the smart play but we might be waiting a while. I went with a 10900K also for this reason, so would be pretty sad if no macOS support meant I made two wrong choices but have been gaming with it in the mean time and have been floored by the performance different to my 5700XT
 
Back
Top