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MP All Models AMD Polaris, Vega, & Navi GPU macOS Support

Unklemac said:
Any good news on the eGPU (TB1/TB2 support), and Mac Pro Vega fanspeed?

Perhaps some performance boosts atleast?
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In my iMac I have a Vega Frontier Edition connected via TB3. Fan speed is still very high :(.

Oddly, I don't get the egpu icon (even though the GPU is available for processing, and connecting a display works). It's also recognised correctly now, up until now it's just been detected as XXXX.

Card behaves fine though - no shutdowns/crashes at all (but it does have a 600w PSU to itself :p)
 
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Brian Y said:
In my iMac I have a Vega Frontier Edition connected via TB3. Fan speed is still very high :(.

Oddly, I don't get the egpu icon (even though the GPU is available for processing, and connecting a display works). It's also recognised correctly now, up until now it's just been detected as XXXX.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the quick reply, so I guess we have to wait for perhaps 10.13.5 or later.

Regarding eGPU, I think it will change back and forth until they have it "right".
 
Unklemac said:
Thanks for the quick reply, so I guess we have to wait for perhaps 10.13.5 or later.

Regarding eGPU, I think it will change back and forth until they have it "right".
Click to expand...

Yeah, I get the feeling they released support a bit too soon - but if the early days of graphics switching were anything to go by, 10.14 should be much better (hopefully!)

That said, they've managed to get the FE drivers pretty solid. I use mine for OpenCL compute and it's way more stable than the official AMD drivers for linux. Trying to get ROCm running under Ubuntu was an absolute pain - especially as I have two different breeds of AMD card in the same system (internal 580 + external FE). Under OSX, driver management is flawless.

The only thing I wish they'd fix is the lag when using displays over multiple GPUs. Doesn't make any real difference as most people only use 1 GPU, but when I tried to have my external display run off the egpu, there was a noticeable lag (maybe 5 seconds) when moving an app between screens running on different gpus.
 
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Brian Y said:
That said, they've managed to get the FE drivers pretty solid. I use mine for OpenCL compute and it's way more stable than the official AMD drivers for linux...
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Anyone else experiencing GPU "noise" (sounds like HDD searching), when you scroll/move mouse or moveing UI elements (Finder window etc.) ?

This is only in 10.13.4 Beta 5 - if anyone can share if a "real" Mac Pro has this issue.
 
In my experience, with my old GTX 970 which suffered from extreme coil whine, it only happened when the GPU was running flat out. For instance, in the menus of certain games, it would be rendering full-speed, pointlessly, at some insane frame rate. As soon as the game started up and the frame rate was limited to something more reasonable, the coil whine would subside.

That makes me wonder if maybe the Vega card isn't being clocked down appropriately, if maybe it's essentially running wide open doing nothing like my 970 would be rendering some stupid loading or menu screen.
 
Mockletoy said:
In my experience, with my old GTX 970 which suffered from extreme coil whine, it only happened when the GPU was running flat out. For instance, in the menus of certain games, it would be rendering full-speed, pointlessly, at some insane frame rate. As soon as the game started up and the frame rate was limited to something more reasonable, the coil whine would subside.

That makes me wonder if maybe the Vega card isn't being clocked down appropriately, if maybe it's essentially running wide open doing nothing like my 970 would be rendering some stupid loading or menu screen.
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The AMD card almost always come with unnecessarily high voltage. e.g. My 7950 factory voltage is 1.094V, and I can turn it down to 0.888V (stay at factory 800/1500MHz) without any problem. And the card can run much cooler with lower fan speed with manaually calibrated voltage.

IMO, AMD just lazy, they give the GPU very high voltage supply to assure stability. However, this unnecessarily high voltage also make the card get into thermal throttling much earlier than required.

When you scroll in a browser etc., the card will jump to a much higher power stage. This action can cause coil whine, or sudden fan spin up. It can be quite annoying.

In Windows, we can use Wattman to fine tune what we want and alleviate the problem. But in MacOS, there is no work around. AFAIK, the Vega card only accept signed ROM. Unlike the old card (e.g. HD7950), we can no longer mod the ROM (voltage, fan profile, etc) and flash the card. So, unless you find a Vega ROM that won’t cause coil whine, and that ROM can fit your card. I don’t think there is any feasible work around in MacOS at this moment.
 
Mockletoy said:
It could be intermittent coil whine maybe?
Click to expand...

It is some form of coilwhine, but it wasn’t there until beta 5.

10.13.0 to 10.13.4 Beta 4 = no coil whine.

Yes i know about nasty coil whine running 200fps UI, or doing a Cinebench R15 160-190 fps.

But this beta 5 coilwhine is a different caliber, with a low grinding, rather then a intermitten high pitch.
 
h9826790 said:
The AMD card almost always come with unnecessarily high voltage. e.g. My 7950 factory voltage is 1.094V, and I can turn it down to 0.888V (stay at factory 800/1500MHz) without any problem. And the card can run much cooler with lower fan speed with manaually calibrated voltage.

IMO, AMD just lazy, they give the GPU very high voltage supply to assure stability. However, this unnecessarily high voltage also make the card get into thermal throttling much earlier than required.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I had a Vega 56 for awhile before exchanging it for my current 1080, and it ran very loud and hot by default.

Their tendency to pour on the voltage sounds less like laziness and more like an effort to make use of GPU cores that should really have either been thrown in the garbage or down-clocked and sold as a lower-tier product. Which I guess seems more like greed or desperation, which isn't really better.

Maybe if enough people were to complain, they'd alter the drivers to keep the video card running more reliably at lower clocks when just doing minor things like surfing the web or whatever, but folks running these cards in desktop Macs are such a niche market. Well, maybe once eGPU support goes mainstream they'll pay more attention to details like this.
 
Just wondering how bad the noise is? I found this video:

Is that a good representation of the fan? The Vega would be great as I need it for archviz and it can access system ram but I work in a tiny space and I don't think I could handle that.

I've read this whole thread but don't follow the updates closely. Earlier was mentioned 10.14 could help but that seems to be a ways off.
 
pvdbg said:
Just wondering how bad the noise is?

I've read this whole thread but don't follow the updates closely. Earlier was mentioned 10.14 could help but that seems to be a ways off.
Click to expand...

It's not that high, but it is up there. Probably around 40-50% fanspeed - at 80%+ you feel the jetplane taking off.

If noise is a problem, then set your deadline for when the new Mac Pro comes out with AMD card support. If anything happens before this, then great, but I wouldn't depend on it.
 
Unklemac said:
It's not that high, but it is up there. Probably around 40-50% fanspeed - at 80%+ you feel the jetplane taking off.

If noise is a problem, then set your deadline for when the new Mac Pro comes out with AMD card support. If anything happens before this, then great, but I wouldn't depend on it.
Click to expand...

OK thanks. I may have missed it in this thread but can the VEGA 64 run in a cMP without doing any power supply modifications?

Nevermind, I found that there does need to be additional power supplied. Pixlas mod is beyond my abilities. I had seen a post about using SATA for additional power but can't find it now and not sure if that was enough for 64. Or I guess external PSU. Any recommendations for what the least risky method is?
 
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pvdbg said:
I may have missed it in this thread but can the VEGA 64 run in a cMP without doing any power supply modifications?

Nevermind, I found that there does need to be additional power supplied. Pixlas mod is beyond my abilities. I had seen a post about using SATA for additional power but can't find it now and not sure if that was enough for 64. Or I guess external PSU. Any recommendations for what the least risky method is?
Click to expand...

I can confirm that tapping SATA for power doesn't provide enough power for Vega 64 GPUs. I did the Pixlas mod. It takes time, but once you have all the parts and tools it's not too difficult. I got it done in a couple hours following a really helpful tutorial with pictures. I don't remember the site but it was a blog.
 
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XNorth said:
I can confirm that tapping SATA for power doesn't provide enough power for Vega 64 GPUs. I did the Pixlas mod. It takes time, but once you have all the parts and tools it's not too difficult. I got it done in a couple hours following a really helpful tutorial with pictures. I don't remember the site but it was a blog.
Click to expand...

You have a nice setup :)
 
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Can you test, if Metal Games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or Mafia 3 are working on the Radeon Vega Card?
 
10.13.4 Beta 7

• eGPU is actually recognized but not working (see screenshot)
• on TB3 Macs, FCPX doesn't even use the eGPU anymore. Not for render, not for export
• scores are pretty low (~50000 points less in geekbench)
 

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itdk92 said:
10.13.4 Beta 7

• eGPU is actually recognized but not working (see screenshot)
• on TB3 Macs, FCPX doesn't even use the eGPU anymore. Not for render, not for export
• scores are pretty low (~50000 points less in geekbench)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the update.

eGPU via thunderbolt 2 seems to have been pulled.

can you check if cooling fan control works with cMP and Vega Card?
 
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