MP 7,1 macOS Vega drivers (56/64/Frontier) still quirky?

[benmuetsch]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to ask if the Vega drivers for macOS are still somehow misbehaving. I experimented with Vega cards on a MacPro5,1 during the Mojave / Catalina era and noticed that the cards were quite power-hungry. This seemed to be because the memory clock never scaled down to its lowest possible frequency, unlike how Vega cards behave in Windows (where they usually clock down, even with dual monitor setups, which was one of their advantages).

Now, I have a MacPro7,1, and a friend of mine is looking to part with some Vega cards. I’m interested in running one, but I wanted to check with the community here first: Have the drivers improved in any way? Is anyone still using a Vega, and how are the clock speeds? Specifically, how do the original Vega Pro cards clock, and what frequencies does an iMac Pro report? Right now I'm running Monterey but will update eventually.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers
Ben

 

[krakman]

Some time during Mojave the drivers were optimised.

I have been running a Vega 56 in low power mode ( there is a small dipswitch on the board to select this) in a 5.1 MAc Pro now running Monterey via OCLP.

Adobe Lightroom and FCPX work fine with GPU acceleration

In general everything works fine.

I expect that in a 7.1 you can run the 56 or 64 at full power.

 

[benmuetsch]

Do you have iStat Menus or something similar by any chance? What clock speeds are reported for the memory?

 

[krakman]

Do you have iStat Menus or something similar by any chance? What clock speeds are reported for the memory?

No sorry I can't help you with that.

Somewhere in this forum is a thread about GPUs or specifically the Vega 56, which goes into detail about all the data you want (inc power draw), with comparisons before and after the optimised drivers were released.

I used this info myself to make the decision to purchase a Vega 56 quite a few years ago.

I'm my experience the card has performed flawlessly in the applications I use.

I contributed to that thread so you can search my post history to find it.

 

[sfalatko]

For a free alternative to iStats Menu try stats - https://github.com/exelban/stats

 

[petervagi]

Hey Guys... I have a late 2016 Macbook, and have a Blackmagic EGPU Pro w Vega 56... If I boot to a Monterey, it runs smooth, I have the Vega identified and attached. If I boot to Monterey with OCLP and I attach the EGPU, the EGPU icon pops up on the top menu, but it says no egpu was detected.

What did I do wrong?

I did some testing too, the egpu dissapeared after root patching...

Is there a workaround to recover without reinstalling?

Thank you guys for all help.

 

[krakman]

Is there a workaround to recover without reinstalling?

yes. It's called Kryptonite, you need to reinstall via terminal.

I used it on my Mac Pro 6.1

The Kryptonite installer package has an old version of LILU which overwrites the version in OCLP so you will manually have to replace it with the newer version after installation.

Every time you do an OS update it will delete the Kryptonite installation and you will have to reinstall it again and again and again.

With the Mac Pro In OS newer than Monterey you had to disable the internal GPU to use the external one. I wonder if this will be the case in your 2016 laptop???

Eventually I gave up with the EGPU as the benefit was marginal, it caused a lot of hassle and I stopped editing video for work.

 

[petervagi]

yes. It's called Kryptonite, you need to reinstall via terminal.

I used it on my Mac Pro 6.1

The Kryptonite installer package has an old version of LILU which overwrites the version in OCLP so you will manually have to replace it with the newer version after installation.

Every time you do an OS update it will delete the Kryptonite installation and you will have to reinstall it again and again and again.

With the Mac Pro In OS newer than Monterey you had to disable the internal GPU to use the external one. I wonder if this will be the case in your 2016 laptop???

Eventually I gave up with the EGPU as the benefit was marginal, it caused a lot of hassle and I stopped editing video for work.

I understand, and thank you for your quick reply.

I followed your link and it says Kryptonite is for Thunderbolt 1 and 2 ... my MBPro have Thunderbolt 3...

under Monterey I can disable the internal GPU - the Radeon Pro 460 and use only the VEGA 56... with Davinci Resolve I could gain 4-5x improvement with the Vega 56... tracking, noise reduction, rendering... so it is really worth using it...

Anyway guess the solution you are offering worth testing first on an external SSD install