MP 1,1-5,1 AMD Radeon VII on the Mac Pro 5,1 - Mojave 10.14.4 and 10.14.5 Beta driver results.

[DigitaLife]

All Radeon VII are the same

I purchased an XFX Radeon VII for my cMP 5.1 more than a month ago but unfortunately I have not yet been able to install it because I am still waiting for the double 8 pin cable, which must arrive from Hong Kong, to make the Pixlas Mod.
But today on the forum since I have read some strange things, can you confirm that the Radeon VII card is perfectly compatible with OpenCore and Catalina?
Thanks in advance.

 

[h9826790]

can you confirm that the Radeon VII card is perfectly compatible with OpenCore and Catalina?

Yes, it works

 

[roobarb!]

I purchased an XFX Radeon VII for my cMP 5.1 more than a month ago but unfortunately I have not yet been able to install it because I am still waiting for the double 8 pin cable, which must arrive from Hong Kong, to make the Pixlas Mod.
But today on the forum since I have read some strange things, can you confirm that the Radeon VII card is perfectly compatible with OpenCore and Catalina?
Thanks in advance.

Perfectly.

I have no Pixlas mod in this machine. EVGA PowerLink from the two ports on the board and nothing else. No problems.

Honestly, it's so good. I've been using this machine HEAVILY over the last few months, it has not let me down once.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

Perfectly.

I have no Pixlas mod in this machine. EVGA PowerLink from the two ports on the board and nothing else. No problems.

View attachment 924183
Honestly, it's so good. I've been using this machine HEAVILY over the last few months, it has not let me down once.

Have you run Furmark?

 

[roobarb!]

Have you run Furmark?

Certainly have! Warms the room nicely.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

If you can run 24 hours of that, you’re probably good to go.

 

[DigitaLife]

Perfectly.

I have no Pixlas mod in this machine. EVGA PowerLink from the two ports on the board and nothing else. No problems.

View attachment 924183
Honestly, it's so good. I've been using this machine HEAVILY over the last few months, it has not let me down once.

How is it possible?
Why then did all the forum experts who have the Radeon VII have to install it only with Pixlas Mod?
Incredible!
But then, since I'm still waiting for the cable from Honk Kong (ModDYI) I'll try without Pixlas Mod!
So you only need the cables supplied with the card and PoweLink EVGA?

 

[h9826790]

How is it possible?
Why then did all the forum experts who have the Radeon VII have to install it only with Pixlas Mod?
Incredible!
But then, since I'm still waiting for the cable from Honk Kong (ModDYI) I'll try without Pixlas Mod!
So you only need the cables supplied with the card and PoweLink EVGA?

The silicon quality may make the difference. Some Radeon VII run at pretty low voltage by default, some others may run at much higher voltage.

Anyway, I did some tests. As long as we downvolt the card properly, its very easy to power Radeon VII with mini 6pins only.

How to - downvolt a Radeon VII

I confirmed it's possible to run a radeon VII with the mini 6pin ONLY (no Pixlas mod, no extra PSU, no SATA power, but with power balancing) with my PowerPlay Table kext. I limit the card's power draw to 204W (170 x 120%). This is NOT a random number, but when I perform tests in Windows, I...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[roobarb!]

But then, since I'm still waiting for the cable from Honk Kong (ModDYI) I'll try without Pixlas Mod!
So you only need the cables supplied with the card and PoweLink EVGA?

That's all I needed. I ran a GTX 1080 Ti in this machine in exactly the same way for years.

Every card (and Mac) will be a little bit different, but for various reasons I had the luxury of having three Radeon VIIs to test before sticking with one. None of them caused problems running with the PowerLink from the 2x mini 6-pin sockets, but they did have very different behaviours. One was an inferno, one was decent, but this one is great.

 

[DigitaLife]

The silicon quality may make the difference. Some Radeon VII run at pretty low voltage by default, some others may run at much higher voltage.

Anyway, I did some tests. As long as we downvolt the card properly, its very easy to power Radeon VII with mini 6pins only.

How to - downvolt a Radeon VII

I confirmed it's possible to run a radeon VII with the mini 6pin ONLY (no Pixlas mod, no extra PSU, no SATA power, but with power balancing) with my PowerPlay Table kext. I limit the card's power draw to 204W (170 x 120%). This is NOT a random number, but when I perform tests in Windows, I...

forums.macrumors.com

Is the method to downvolt the Radeon VII reversible?

 

[h9826790]

Of course, it never mod anything on the card, just a kext to inject some parameters during every boot (into the MacOS that has this kext installer).

If you want to revert it, all you need to do is just remove the kext.

 

[DigitaLife]

Perfectly.

I have no Pixlas mod in this machine. EVGA PowerLink from the two ports on the board and nothing else. No problems.

View attachment 924183
Honestly, it's so good. I've been using this machine HEAVILY over the last few months, it has not let me down once.

Can you tell me which cable you used to connect the card?
Can I use the same cable with which I connected the Sapphire RX580?

 

[DigitaLife]

The silicon quality may make the difference. Some Radeon VII run at pretty low voltage by default, some others may run at much higher voltage.

Anyway, I did some tests. As long as we downvolt the card properly, its very easy to power Radeon VII with mini 6pins only.

How to - downvolt a Radeon VII

I confirmed it's possible to run a radeon VII with the mini 6pin ONLY (no Pixlas mod, no extra PSU, no SATA power, but with power balancing) with my PowerPlay Table kext. I limit the card's power draw to 204W (170 x 120%). This is NOT a random number, but when I perform tests in Windows, I...

forums.macrumors.com

That's all I needed. I ran a GTX 1080 Ti in this machine in exactly the same way for years.

Every card (and Mac) will be a little bit different, but for various reasons I had the luxury of having three Radeon VIIs to test before sticking with one. None of them caused problems running with the PowerLink from the 2x mini 6-pin sockets, but they did have very different behaviours. One was an inferno, one was decent, but this one is great.

Please, can you tell me if you used only "Apple Dual Mini PCIE 6 Pin to Standard PCIE 8 Pin Video Card Cable" to connect the motherboard of cMP 5.1 with EVGA PowerLink?
In this case do you connected only one 8 Pin to the EVGA PowerLink or in addition do you used also "8pin female to dual 6+2pin cable"?
Thanks in advance!

 

[roobarb!]

Please, can you tell me if you used only "Apple Dual Mini PCIE 6 Pin to Standard PCIE 8 Pin Video Card Cable" to connect the motherboard of cMP 5.1 with EVGA PowerLink?
In this case do you connected only one 8 Pin to the EVGA PowerLink or in addition do you used also "8pin female to dual 6+2pin cable"?

Sorry for the delay, not visited in the few days!

Yes, the cable I'm using right now is just as you describe; 2x Mini 6-pin Plug to 1x Standard 8-pin Plug, which connects to one of the 8-pin sockets on the PowerLink. The PowerLink has both of its Standard 8-pin output connectors attached, which hook up to the Radeon VII.

You could achieve the same thing with any two cables into the PowerLink. I'd used two standard Apple Mini 6-pin to Standard 6-pin cables into the PowerLink with the GTX 1080 Ti. The only reason I didn't this time is because I included them in the auction when I sold the 1080.

Realistically I guess that you could achieve virtually the same thing without the PowerLink using two cables; a 2x Mini 6-pin plug to 1x Standard 8-pin Socket and then a 1x Standard 8-pin Plug to 2x Standard 8-pin Plugs. The capacitors in the PowerLink are tiny and unlikely to contributing a great deal.

The trick is to combine the supply feed from the logic board so that no one mini 6-pin socket is having more demand placed upon it than the other. You just need to be sure that they share the load, otherwise an auto-resetting fuse will trip in the PSU and your system will hard power off.

 

[DigitaLife]

Sorry for the delay, not visited in the few days!

Yes, the cable I'm using right now is just as you describe; 2x Mini 6-pin Plug to 1x Standard 8-pin Plug, which connects to one of the 8-pin sockets on the PowerLink. The PowerLink has both of its Standard 8-pin output connectors attached, which hook up to the Radeon VII.

You could achieve the same thing with any two cables into the PowerLink. I'd used two standard Apple Mini 6-pin to Standard 6-pin cables into the PowerLink with the GTX 1080 Ti. The only reason I didn't this time is because I included them in the auction when I sold the 1080.

Realistically I guess that you could achieve virtually the same thing without the PowerLink using two cables; a 2x Mini 6-pin plug to 1x Standard 8-pin Socket and then a 1x Standard 8-pin Plug to 2x Standard 8-pin Plugs. The capacitors in the PowerLink are tiny and unlikely to contributing a great deal.

The trick is to combine the supply feed from the logic board so that no one mini 6-pin socket is having more demand placed upon it than the other. You just need to be sure that they share the load, otherwise an auto-resetting fuse will trip in the PSU and your system will hard power off.

Thanks for the reply!
But I have another question: do you use OpenCore with the Radeon VII?

 

[MIKX]

DigitalLife

If you have tWO empty SATA internal sockets in the CMP you can also add their power to the PoweLink total.

This example is for my Sapphire Dual-X HD 7970 3gb ( = spare EFI flashed ). . . .or . . my MSI Armor RX 580 8gb.

it's basically " How to setup a Powerlink". puts all inputted power into teh PowerLink, then it merges and smoothes out all that power to the GPU.

EVGA PowerLink with AMD GPUs

Just got the EVGA PowerLink working with my Sapphire Dual-X 7970 3gb. IMPORTANT : The power input sockets on the PowerLink are 2 X 8 Pin female and cannot be changed. The EVGA PowerLink ensures that exact power demanded by a GPU is supplied. That said, one must still supply enough power to...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[roobarb!]

do you use OpenCore with the Radeon VII?

Absolutely, I'm on an earlier revision because it's working perfectly for me right now, but this gives me the text boot picker and Windows 10 in legacy BIOS mode. I've found this combination to be the most robust.

Hang on... I think this is the post with my OpenCore EFI settings.

 

[DigitaLife]

Absolutely, I'm on an earlier revision because it's working perfectly for me right now, but this gives me the text boot picker and Windows 10 in legacy BIOS mode. I've found this combination to be the most robust.

Hang on... I think this is the post with my OpenCore EFI settings.

Ok thank you!
But this is my situation.
I installed the Radeon VII.
I have two monitors connected: Apple Cinema HD 30 "and Apple LED Cinema Display 27". Obviously the Cinema HD 30 "I had to connect it with a StarTech DisplayPort to DVI Dual Link Active Adapter.
When I start the Mac Pro without OC, with Mojave, everything is OK! But then when I reinstalled OC 0.5.9 strange things happen:
1) when the OpenCanopy boot picker appears the keyboard and mouse no longer work and therefore I am forced to start with the default drive (Catalina) without being able to choose;
2) once the boot starts, I don't see the Apple logo but only the progress bar (on the LED Cinema Display 27 ");
3) finally, when the login screen appears, on the Cinema HD 30", the resolution is the minimum available and the 27" Cinema Display LED monitor is no longer visible (the system cannot detect it).
What do you think about this?
Thanks in advance!

 

[roobarb!]

What do you think about this?

You're better off asking in the OpenCore on Mac Pro thread, I'm afraid. My experience only goes so far as v0.5.6 and I haven't looked at OpenCanopy at all. There are some very knowledgeable people over there who'll be able to point you in the right direction.

 

[DigitaLife]

Hi, I will share some benchmarking done running the Radeon VII on my Mac Pro 5,1. It has the pixlas mod (PCIe power breakout cable from the PSU mobo-connector) done on it, so I have no power issues. I tested it with the Vega 10 driver, and the Vega 12 driver which resulted in freezes. The Vega 12 driver only activates 20 compute units, while the Vega 10 driver will utilise the full 60.

In short, one can add the card's ID 0x66AF1002 to the AMDRadeonX5000.kext’s Info.plist in macOS 10.14.4 beta 3. This was recently also successfully done and explained by "theitsage" using it as an eGPU, documented over here https://egpu.io/forums/builds/mid-2...2gbps-tb3-razer-core-macos-10-14-4-theitsage/

There are two sections in the Info.plist, one for Vega 10 and another for Vega 12. The Vega 10 driver clearly gives the best performance. I also compared it with a Geekbench 4.3.1 score I got form my former Vega Frontier Edition card in December 2018. We can see that the Vega 10 driver is a good temporal solution for the Radeon VII, however the full potential will of course come once the Vega 20 driver is out, hopefully by the final release of 10.14.4.

Here are the results, I’ll let the images speak for themselves. From the Geekbench score we can see that there is a substantial room for improvement, as the Frontier Edition is not a faster card/chip by itself, at 14nm and lower clock speeds, half the memory bandwidth too. All benchmarks that refer to the "AMD Radeon RX Vega10 Unknown Prototype Compute Engine" is the Radeon VII.

EDIT : After updating to 10.14.4 Beta 4 (build 18E205e) there seem to be no more freezes as experienced with the Beta 3. Performance is about the same. Vega 20 driver section is still not there, so still using the Vega 10 driver.

EDIT #2: With 10.14.5 Beta the Radeon VII got the full support out-of-the-box. LuxMark results are very impressive. See further down.

View attachment 822703 View attachment 822704 View attachment 822705 View attachment 822706 View attachment 822707 View attachment 822708 View attachment 822709 View attachment 822710 View attachment 822711 View attachment 822712

Sorry for the stupid question: but why in the OpenGL Extension Viewer do I not see the AMD logo as it appears in CLing?
Thanks in advance for your reply!

 

[h9826790]

Sorry for the stupid question: but why in the OpenGL Extension Viewer do I not see the AMD logo as it appears in CLing?
Thanks in advance for your reply!

A bug in OGL Ext Viewer, purely cosmetic

 

[DigitaLife]

Yes, it works
View attachment 922349

Sorry if I insist, but can you help me please?
when I start Catalina (Radeon VII + your package OC 0.5.9), my Cinema Display HD 30" (connected by StarTEch DisplayPort to DVI Dual Link Active Adapter) shows login window with the default resolution (1280 x 800) instead of the maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600, and every time, after login I must to change the resolution!
This problem does not happen with Mojave or with Windows, but only with Catalina!
Thanks in advance for the help you will give me to solve this problem!

 

[h9826790]

Sorry if I insist, but can you help me please?
when I start Catalina (Radeon VII + your package OC 0.5.9), my Cinema Display HD 30" (connected by StarTEch DisplayPort to DVI Dual Link Active Adapter) shows login window with the default resolution (1280 x 800) instead of the maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600, and every time, after login I must to change the resolution!
This problem does not happen with Mojave or with Windows, but only with Catalina!
Thanks in advance for the help you will give me to solve this problem!

TBH, I have no idea. I keep updating and testing Catalina, but I don’t really use it because it’s buggy for me.

I also don’t have the 30” ACD to run any test.

If the same setup works in Windows and Mojave. Then I can only assume Catalina cause the issue. Which may be no easy fix at all.

Anyway, may be time to move to Big Sur. For me, the beta 1 is already less buggy than 10.15.5.

 

[DigitaLife]

TBH, I have no idea. I keep updating and testing Catalina, but I don’t really use it because it’s buggy for me.

I also don’t have the 30” ACD to run any test.

If the same setup works in Windows and Mojave. Then I can only assume Catalina cause the issue. Which may be no easy fix at all.

Anyway, may be time to move to Big Sur. For me, the beta 1 is already less buggy than 10.15.5.

I have also tried with the Sapphire RX580: connecting directly to the DVI socket everything is ok, but through the active DP adapter ---> DVI DL, Catalina gives the same problem!
So is there incompatibility between the adapter and Catalina?

 

[h9826790]

So is there incompatibility between the adapter and Catalina?

I believe this is the reason