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Dual RX 480s in Mac Pro 5,1 running MacOS (w/ How-to)

electonic said:
Thank you for your input. That may actually be true. Too bad I can't find an non-OC version with 8GB RAM. I'll have to think about trying it out anyways ... worst thing that can happen will be a hard shutdown, I guess ;)
Click to expand...

I tried a PowerColor Red Devil RX 470 this past week. It has an 8-pin power port. A simple mini PCIe 6-pin to 8-pin cable worked perfectly fine for the entire time I used it.

I went as far as using a Y adapter to draw power from 2 SATA ports to 8-pin in order to run a 3-way Polaris 10 CrossFire. Luxmark ran well with this setup. Luxball scene got very close to 35,000.
 
my single gtx 660 gets 3023 on luxmark, luxball
what is a single rx 470 getting? (1166 points? thats almost 4x the speed of my 660)
 
A single RX 470 gets close to 11,000 in Luxball. RX 480 gets close to 12,000. The 3-way Crossfire I set up was 2 RX 480 and 1 RX 470.
 
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Installed 10.12.1 Beta tonight. Polaris support is definitely getting better. The Baffin personality which was in AMDRadeon4000.kext now has its own kext, AMDRadeon4100.kext. RX 480 is now not crashing OpenGL apps anymore. This is the first time in nearly 2 months owning these RX 480 GPUs I was able to finish Unigine benchmarks.

RX480-Valley.png RX480-Heaven.png
 
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Starting to look promising - hope that maybe a RX480 8GB will work fully in MacOS and we can get a boot screen (after a flash)?

It would be nice to have an upgrade to better 1440p performance than my 7950 Mac Edition one of these days without any hacks (i.e keeping SIP enabled and standard kexts).
 
theitsage said:
Installed 10.12.1 Beta tonight. Polaris support is definitely getting better. The Baffin personality which was in AMDRadeon4000.kext now has its own kext, AMDRadeon4100.kext. RX 480 is now not crashing OpenGL apps anymore. This is the first time in nearly 2 months owning these RX 480 GPUs I was able to finish Unigine benchmarks.

View attachment 656726 View attachment 656727
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Hello. You have posted some new info; it my be important, for my installation.

About the "R9 NANO" and the "macOS Sierra Final" installation…


From now on; do I need to place my card on the info.plist in

AMDRadeon4100.kext
instead of
AMDRadeon4000.kext?

Is it still on the Baffin <key>?


Thank’s
Xanix
 
Xanix said:
Hello. You have posted some new info; it my be important, for my installation.

About the "R9 NANO" and the "macOS Sierra Final" installation…


From now on; do I need to place my card on the info.plist in

AMDRadeon4100.kext
instead of
AMDRadeon4000.kext?

Is it still on the Baffin <key>?


Thank’s
Xanix
Click to expand...

Yeah not enough people talking about the Nano which has the best value, efficiency and compute performance ratio.
 
Xanix said:
Hello. You have posted some new info; it my be important, for my installation.

About the "R9 NANO" and the "macOS Sierra Final" installation…


From now on; do I need to place my card on the info.plist in

AMDRadeon4100.kext
instead of
AMDRadeon4000.kext?

Is it still on the Baffin <key>?


Thank’s
Xanix
Click to expand...

I don't have a R9 Nano to confirm. My guess is you should add your Nano's PCI ID into the AMDRadeon4100.kext. Same process as you did with AMDRadeon4000.kext to make your R9 Nano work the last time.

We'd appreciate some benchmarks to see how the R9 Nano compares to the newer Polaris 10 cards.
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Yeah not enough people talking about the Nano which has the best value, efficiency and compute performance ratio.
Click to expand...

Hi. Well, the “RX” series is newer and cheaper; so, in general, people prefer them…
The “NANO” is the AMD's underdog model. A little gem; in my opinion, the best card released by AMD, in years!

Call me crazy but, I wouldn’t trade it for 2 x RX 480… maybe, only for the NANO v2:)

>The "HMB" makes a lot of diference; on the RX, the bottleneck is the memory, on the NANO, is the GPU. It's a super small, reliable and efective card.

Regards,
Xanix
 
Xanix said:
Hi. Well, the “RX” series is newer and cheaper; so, in general, people prefer them…
The “NANO” is the AMD's underdog model. A little gem; in my opinion, the best card released by AMD, in years!

Call me crazy but, I wouldn’t trade it for 2 x RX 480… maybe, only for the NANO v2:)

>The "HMB" makes a lot of diference; on the RX, the bottleneck is the memory, on the NANO, is the GPU. It's a super small, reliable and efective card.

Regards,
Xanix
Click to expand...

Used Nano can be bought for little more than a RX480 now. Price is falling fast!
 

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theitsage said:
I don't have a R9 Nano to confirm. My guess is you should add your Nano's PCI ID into the AMDRadeon4100.kext. Same process as you did with AMDRadeon4000.kext to make your R9 Nano work the last time.

We'd appreciate some benchmarks to see how the R9 Nano compares to the newer Polaris 10 cards.
Click to expand...

My friend; thank you. I will try, you're suggestion. This weekend, I'm going to install "Sierra", on an external HD (same thing I've done, on the Beta phase). The final migration, will take a little more time. Going to "RAID 10", the 4 hard drives. Need to backup "everything" first!:D

I will do some tests and post here, the results... maybe help some members, that are considering NANO or RX...

Kind regards,
Xanix
 
Fiji for consumer market is EOL. Only server and workstation parts are produced, and offered. Nano, and all Fiji consumer GPUs with Fiji chip, are available only while stock of them is available. So if you are planning on buying one - better be quick ;)
 
hay just want to ask is there any point in getting a card with 8gbvram ? what kind of apps can use more than 4gbvram?
i know 1080p video edting wants 2gbvram 4K likes 4gbvram.

is it just 3D rendering that needs that much or more?
 
orph said:
hay just want to ask is there any point in getting a card with 8gbvram ? what kind of apps can use more than 4gbvram?
i know 1080p video edting wants 2gbvram 4K likes 4gbvram.

is it just 3D rendering that needs that much or more?
Click to expand...

Several factors here depending on complexity of your project and the VRAM buffer size set by the application. Some have a fixed size, some configurable, and some infinite. Most NLE apps render a lower quality video in the background so that they can get around not enough VRAM or GPU power being available and still have decent live scrubbing.

More is better but it would help if apps were updated more often to take advantage of new hardware. Most apps have to support older systems so progress isn't as quick as we would like.

For real time performance, more system RAM and great single core CPU performance will still perform better than a system with many weaker cores and less RAM, even if the latter has more VRAM.
 
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SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Several factors here depending on complexity of your project and the VRAM buffer size set by the application. Some have a fixed size, some configurable, and some infinite. Most NLE apps render a lower quality video in the background so that they can get around not enough VRAM or GPU power being available and still have decent live scrubbing.

More is better but it would help if apps were updated more often to take advantage of new hardware. Most apps have to support older systems so progress isn't as quick as we would like.

For real time performance, more system RAM and great single core CPU performance will still perform better than a system with many weaker cores and less RAM, even if the latter has more VRAM.
Click to expand...
Everything depends on the construction of memory framebuffer in the drivers. Fiji has only 4 GB of HBM, but with 512 GB/s of bandwidth, and the fact that data is "streamed" through the core, rather than stored in GPU VRAM it is enough for even 4K resolution gaming.
 
koyoot said:
Everything depends on the construction of memory framebuffer in the drivers. Fiji has only 4 GB of HBM, but with 512 GB/s of bandwidth, and the fact that data is "streamed" through the core, rather than stored in GPU VRAM it is enough for even 4K resolution gaming.
Click to expand...

Yes, you can use AMD consumer cards for video and have better performance in professional video apps than most of Nvidia offerings because of the better bandwidth, OpenCL optimisation and FP.
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Yes, you can use AMD consumer cards for video and have better performance in professional video apps than most of Nvidia offerings because of the better bandwidth, OpenCL optimisation and FP.
Click to expand...
I dont think this is relevant to the merit of the question we were discussing ;).
 
ah sorry if i was off topic, just been looking at cards and wondered about it.
 
Brand new R9 Nano was on sale at Micro Center for $291.59. I got the last one at the local store. It draws more than 150W so I needed to use a Y splitter from 2 mini 6-pins to one 8-pin for the GPU. R9 Nano on the left, RX 480 on the right.

R9Nano-Luxmark.png Screen Shot 2016-08-01 at 5.29.33 PM.png
R9Nano-Valley.png RX480-Valley.png

R9Nano-Heaven.png RX480-Heaven.png
 
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Hmmmm... I've seen the R9 Nano pop up here and there. Never really heard about that card apart from these threads here.

What's the compatibility in Sierra like? Similar to R9 280X, or flaky like RX 480?

I was looking forward to 8GB RAM for 4k grading in Resolve, but if I'd switch to RX 470 from my 280X it seems more like a side grade. Meanwhile, the Nano doubles up on floating point, pixel fill and texture rate.

EDIT: by the way, is the Nano loud? That smallish, single fan doesn't look that convincing…
 
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