- Joined
- May 14, 2020
- Messages
- 5
Hi everyone! I've been really impressed by the information available and the ability to build a AMD hack in 2020. Especially with OC the experience is really good and as a dev I'm really liking the declarative and explicit nature of the configuration process because I can diff config plists and have consistent behaviour from setup to setup.
This has been my third attempt to move to macOS and at last it looks like I'm here to say Please find the build details below and let me know if you have any questions.
Note on Handoff, Continuity and ApplePay: Even before getting Fenvi card, call forwarding was working and SMS were syncing via iCloud sync albeit with a significant delay. Once I got Wifi and Bluetooth working, continuity and handoff were refusing to start working until I relogged to iCloud and then twice relogged to Apple ID account with resettin NVRAM in between the attempts. At last, my iPhone 6 was also explicitly paired via Bluetooth. As for ApplePay, it was quite unexpected but against all odds I was presented with an option to pay with it on Dominos and it actually worked
HW:
The Good:
Benchmarks:
This has been my third attempt to move to macOS and at last it looks like I'm here to say Please find the build details below and let me know if you have any questions.
Note on Handoff, Continuity and ApplePay: Even before getting Fenvi card, call forwarding was working and SMS were syncing via iCloud sync albeit with a significant delay. Once I got Wifi and Bluetooth working, continuity and handoff were refusing to start working until I relogged to iCloud and then twice relogged to Apple ID account with resettin NVRAM in between the attempts. At last, my iPhone 6 was also explicitly paired via Bluetooth. As for ApplePay, it was quite unexpected but against all odds I was presented with an option to pay with it on Dominos and it actually worked
HW:
- CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X
- Motherboard: Asus B450-F Strix
- RAM: 32GB DDR4 3200MHz
- Graphics: Sapphire Nitro+ RX580 4GB
- Storage: ADATA SX8200PNP 1TB for macOS and Samsung SSD 970 EVO 250GB for Windows
- Networking: Intel I211 Gigabit Ethernet + Fenvi FV-HB1200 Wifi+Bluetooth combo
- Sound: Realtek ALC S1220A
- OS: macOS Catalina 10.15.4 + Windows 10
- OC: 0.5.8
- SMBios: MacPro7,1
- ACPI: Pre-built SSDT-EC-USBX-DESKTOP.aml from Dortania guide
- EFI drivers:
- HfsPlus.efi
- OpenCanopy.efi (for GUI boot menu)
- OpenRuntime.efi (OpenCore)
- Kexts:
- AppleALC.kext
- AppleMCEReporterDisabler.kext
- Lilu.kext
- MacProMemoryNotificationDisabler.kext
- NVMeFix.kext
- SmallTreeIntel82576.kext
SMCAMDProcessor.kext(it gives 3-10% performance penalty in both ST and MT workloads so I'm not sacrificing those and by-default power management already utilises all freq boost and powersave modes, I had some issues where the kext was actually causing higher power consumption so it looks like just the stock behaviour is the best one out there)- VirtualSMC.kext
- WhateverGreen.kext
- Boot args: keepsyms=1 debug=0x100 alcid=1 npci=0x3000
The Good:
- Everything! No, really, if you don't count sleep that is
- Handoff, Continuity and Instant hotspot (it took me a while to get this one working, continuity is kinda neat but equally useless in my workflow but I still wanted the "native" experience)
- ApplePay (remote activation on iPhone 6)
- XCode (plus Simulator) and VirtualBox work really well. On VBox I'm using virtio-net driver for bridged access to my LAN and the performance can saturate 1Gbit link without a problem
- CPU performance is impressively good. See GB5 results below
- GPU acceleration works too including Metal and HEVC acceleration (it is janky but I don't watch HEVC videos so ¯\(ツ)/¯)
- Gaming performance is acceptable but could be better - enough for League of Legends and Divinity Original Sin (not enough for Divinity Original Sin 2)
- General system responsiveness is comparable or better than Windows
- Sleep doesn't work because I'm using the default workaround for USB port limit provided by OpenCore and since my workstation runs 24/7 and is quite silent I'm just too lazy to get it fixed
- HEVC playback is janky as mentioned above (stuttering on every keyframe(?)), I don't need it but for someone who does this might be a problem. On the other hand the CPU is sufficient for SW decoding so might be non-issue too
- Obviously, HyperKit-based virtualisation features are unavailable
- Crossover doesn't work (at least for the apps I tried to use)
- Weird ass GPU performance problems where OpenCL/Metal results are quite low compared to what I'm seeing on this forum (see benchmarks). So far I think I've tried everything including but not limited to using different WEG boot args, forcing PCIE 3.0 link speed, flashing different GPU BIOSes, trying AGPMInjector and RadeonBoost kexts, etc. However, do note that in Windows the GB5 performance is as equally problematic with OpenCL far exceeding Vulkan so the issue might be with my GPU specifically. At this point it doesn't matter since I'm getting a used Vega 56 because it is dirt cheap for the RX 5600 XT/5700 level of performance at the cost of power usage
- Need to reboot to Windows to play Star Citizen
Benchmarks:
- CPU: 1294 / 9265 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2203895
- Metal: 30808 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/934417
- OpenCL: 23461 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/934420
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