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goMac

macrumors 604
Apr 15, 2004
7,663
1,694
Sure. I see your point.

But how could Apple “ignore” it, when it has been working for at least 1-2 year?

Because they're re-writing a bunch of the graphics stack right now. Stuff is going to break.

How does any software get new bugs?

My point is they actively needed to block it, because it has always worked.

This isn't at all how they'd actively block something.
 
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antoine69

macrumors newbie
Feb 8, 2018
7
3
For those who have a Vega FE liquid cooled that isn't working, have you tried flashing the air cooled BIOS to your card?

I found that there's an incompatibility with the Akitio Node. Swapping in a Sonnet Breakaway 350 + Corsair SF600 PSU solve the problem in 10.13.3 and 10.13.4 b2. Only with Vega FE LC. The air version was properly seen by MacOs
 

thephased

macrumors member
Oct 22, 2009
38
7
Received an XFX Vega 56 (custom board/fan model) yesterday. Thought it may be helpful to report that everything in system profiler is ok and it's detected as Vega 56 in 10.13.4 Beta 2.

-Sleep and wake work fine.
-DisplayPort + HDMI audio/video work OOB

-Benchmarks (Luxmark, Valley, Heaven, Geekbench, Cinebench R15) all ran ok except for GFXBench which shutdown the system. Running off Mac Pro PSU though using 2x6pin > 2x8pin PCIe and I cannot find any documentation of the TDP on this particular card.

-Unfortunately, as others have mentioned the fan runs at full speed or slightly slower in certain apps.

Luxmark shows the card clocked at 1590MHz core which to my limited knowledge is the target clock, but the way Vega cards work with power states is somewhat different than others cards. Is macOS overriding the BIOS power management? Would explain why fans are at full speed.

I thought with Vega things are controlled pretty well at the BIOS level to prevent just this. Of course it can be temporarily overridden in an overclock, but the card can downclock P States 6 & 7 beyond your control. It's been a while since I've tried overclocking Vega, sorry. Can't believe it's been almost 8 months since Vega FE.
 
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h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,656
8,587
Hong Kong
Received an XFX Vega 56 (custom board/fan model) yesterday. Thought it may be helpful to report that everything in system profiler is ok and it's detected as Vega 56 in 10.13.4 Beta 2.

-Sleep and wake work fine.
-DisplayPort + HDMI audio/video work OOB

-Benchmarks (Luxmark, Valley, Heaven, Geekbench, Cinebench R15) all ran ok except for GFXBench which shutdown the system. Running off Mac Pro PSU though using 2x6pin > 2x8pin PCIe and I cannot find any documentation of the TDP on this particular card.

-Unfortunately, as others have mentioned the fan runs at full speed or slightly slower in certain apps.

Luxmark shows the card clocked at 1590MHz core which to my limited knowledge is the target clock, but the way Vega cards work with power states is somewhat different than others cards. Is macOS overriding the BIOS power management? Would explain why fans are at full speed.

I thought with Vega things are controlled pretty well at the BIOS level to prevent just this. Of course it can be temporarily overridden in an overclock, but the card can downclock P States 6 & 7 beyond your control. It's been a while since I've tried overclocking Vega, sorry. Can't believe it's been almost 8 months since Vega FE.

Thanks for the report. Yes, GFXBench is very demanding. I monitor it’s power consumption few days ago. And it can actually draw as much as Furmark does.

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ticky-discussion.2099092/page-2#post-25810545

Anyway, did you monitor the power draw? iStat or hardware monitor can do it properly. If the power draw is not very even distributed via the two 8pins, you may able to balance them by yourself to avoid shutdown. But if they are quite balanced, then there is not much you can do except something like Pixlas mod. Otherwise, you have to avoid extreme demand, otherwise, shutdown may occur at anytime.

My understanding is that MacOS can override the VBIOS power management. However, not sure if this is really happening. And that clock speed from Luxmark doesn’t mean much, that number often wrong in MacOS.
 
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MacManu77

macrumors regular
Jan 31, 2018
110
4
Received an XFX Vega 56 (custom board/fan model) yesterday. Thought it may be helpful to report that everything in system profiler is ok and it's detected as Vega 56 in 10.13.4 Beta 2.

-Sleep and wake work fine.
-DisplayPort + HDMI audio/video work OOB

-Benchmarks (Luxmark, Valley, Heaven, Geekbench, Cinebench R15) all ran ok except for GFXBench which shutdown the system. Running off Mac Pro PSU though using 2x6pin > 2x8pin PCIe and I cannot find any documentation of the TDP on this particular card.

-Unfortunately, as others have mentioned the fan runs at full speed or slightly slower in certain apps.

Luxmark shows the card clocked at 1590MHz core which to my limited knowledge is the target clock, but the way Vega cards work with power states is somewhat different than others cards. Is macOS overriding the BIOS power management? Would explain why fans are at full speed.

I thought with Vega things are controlled pretty well at the BIOS level to prevent just this. Of course it can be temporarily overridden in an overclock, but the card can downclock P States 6 & 7 beyond your control. It's been a while since I've tried overclocking Vega, sorry. Can't believe it's been almost 8 months since Vega FE.

What a result with Cinebench15?
 

goMac

macrumors 604
Apr 15, 2004
7,663
1,694
You clearly underestimate Apple :)

I'm the one saying it sounds like they accidentally broke something. I think you're the one given them more credit.

I think it would actually take more work to intentionally crash the Mac than ignore the card.

If the graphics stack on macOS is anything, it's buggy. It's not like we're dealing with a perfect, bug free set of drivers and so it's super conspicuous when something broke.

Apple breaks this sort of stuff all the time, and then it gets fixed in the next release. That's what this whole thread has been.

Occam's razor. If you're dealing with a system Apple keeps adding and fixing bugs in, a new crash is probably just another bug that surfaced.

This is also not the first time TB2 eGPU support was broken and then fixed. If they were intentionally breaking it they wouldn't have fixed it again last time.
 
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thephased

macrumors member
Oct 22, 2009
38
7

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h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,656
8,587
Hong Kong
That is extremely slow. How can that be?

That looks perfectly correct to me. The Cinebench OpenGL test is very heavily CPU single thread limiting. As long as he is using the W3680, that 69.25FPS can't be improved by upgrading the GPU.

This is a known issue for long long time. If he "upgrade" to any stronger Nvidia GPU, the FPS will further drop to at about 60FPS because of the driver overhead difference (in macOS).
HD7950.jpg
1080Ti.jpg
 

Master Tom

macrumors newbie
Feb 17, 2018
14
3
That looks perfectly correct to me. The Cinebench OpenGL test is very heavily CPU single thread limiting. As long as he is using the W3680, that 69.25FPS can't be improved by upgrading the GPU.

This is a known issue for long long time. If he "upgrade" to any stronger Nvidia GPU, the FPS will further drop to at about 60FPS because of the driver overhead difference (in macOS).
View attachment 751593 View attachment 751592

Is the Xeon so much slower than a i7-4790K?
The Vega should be 2 times faster than the 290X, but it is the other way round.
 

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  • Cinebench - Screen Shot 2018-02-18 at 19.12.50.png
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h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,656
8,587
Hong Kong
Is the Xeon so much slower than a i7-4790K?
The Vega should be 2 times faster than the 290X, but it is the other way round.

As I said, that's nothing to do with the Vega's speed, but purely the CPU single thread performance. And Yes, W3680 is that slow if compare to the 4790K.

The 4790K only has 4 cores, but it can score 883cb. The W3680 has 6 cores, but it only score 804cb.

So, for 4790K, 221cb per core. For W3680 134cb per core. The 4790K is ~65% faster.

If you are with the hackintosh that has 4790K and 290X. You can try to downclock the CPU, and you will see the Cinebench OpenGL score drop straight away. If you downclock the CPU to match the W3680's single core performance. You should see the FPS will drop to about 70.

On the other hand, purely overclock / downclock the GPU has almost no effect.
 

MisterAndrew

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Sep 15, 2015
2,895
2,390
Portland, Ore.
To me it seems like eGPU people are going to want to use Vega without noise and so I haven't given up yet.

Apparently Apple fixed the fan issue for eGPU, but for some reason it's still an issue for an internal card. I think the only hope is that the new modular MP will take standard video cards and the issue will be resolved then, but that's likely several months away. For the time being it looks like using a liquid cooled card with a quiet fan is the only solution. People have stated that the liquid cooled Vega FE doesn't work and I don't know if the liquid Vega 64 works. So at least for the FE, apparently the air cooled BIOS would need to be flashed to it for MacOS to recognize it. I don't know if there are any differences between the cards that would cause an issue using the other BIOS. If there were, then the liquid cooler would have to be installed onto an air cooled card.

It's unfortunate that the cryptocurrency mining craze has made the RX cards ridiculously expensive and hard to find. Hopefully the situation will improve later this year. But the workstation cards have been largely untouched by miners and can still be found for less than MSRP. I don't think anyone has tested the WX 9100 yet to see if it also has the fan speed issue. I imagine it does, but it's hard to say. A lot of people probably aren't willing to spend hundreds of dollars more for a card that offers about 9% less performance than a Vega FE, but with the lower power consumption it's a much better match for the cMP.
 
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antoine69

macrumors newbie
Feb 8, 2018
7
3
in my case, as a owner of a FE LC, fan run a little bit less noisier in 10.13.4 beta3 than in 10.13.3 but not completely noiseless when on idle. On the contrary eject the card still cause a reboot on the 10.13.4 beta 3. Performance of the FE's driver seems about the same of the 10.13.3 in FCPX 10.3.4 and Engine Haven.
 
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Unklemac

macrumors newbie
Jan 4, 2018
28
12
Denmark
What do you mean? the page and fan?

With Vega cards in cMP the fan speeds are high at idle. Opening the above Macworld link, makes my vega 56 go silent (fans run like they should at idle). You can run this website on a secondary screen to get the benefit even with running other apps fullscreen like Final Cut Pro X.

With WX9100, I can’t use Macworld link, but instead having an old H.264 video in quicktime (pause works too), makes the fan speed go down too at idle (like they should). Works all the time, even with other fullscreen apps above.

Let me know if I need to share the H.264 video (its 100mb).
 
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