Hi All,

 

this is to sum up my experiences up to this date trying to pass through a Radeon Pro W5500 for mainly Mac OS VMs on Unraid 6.9.2. 

I had before successfully been setting up Mac OS High Sierra with an Nvidia 1080Ti, but as this OS being a tad dated and being the last supported OS for this card , I was hoping to make a new installation with a more modern AMD GPU and Catalina or above.

 

So, I went over to Dortania and checked the support for recent AMD cards, the Radeon Pro W5500 seems supported. 
The card is also appealing for just occupying a single PCI slot. 

 

I first tried Big Sur and Monterey with the OpenCore Boot argument agdpmod=pikera as stipulated in the dortania guide, but could not get it to work so far. In Big Sur the boot process stops with "Failed to send SMC number of eGPU P states (16) due to XxXX!" It seems Big Sur treats the card as an external GPU, despite running a Mac Pro or iMac Pro SMBIOS which both have no iGPUs. Monterey gets also stuck during Mac OS boot, though have not looked into the specifics here yet. 

 

After some digging online, I found following forum post on macvidcards which proved useful information going forward, however also essentially stating that Big Sur and above are not supported by the card, though there seem to be Hackintosher out there running the card with Big Sur. I then therefore aimed a bit lower for Catalina and had more success with it. 

 

https://www.macvidcards.eu/installing-macvidcards-patch-for-amd-radeon-rx-5000-w-5000-cards-under-macos-catalina-10-15-5-or-later

Catalina 10.15.7

It seems there had been changes to Graphics kexts from 10.15.5 onwards up to 10.15.7, which prevented the card from working. By replacing the Extension AMDRadeonX6000HWServices.kext in 10.15.7 this could be fixed, however Metal and Graphics acceleration do not work. The replacement extension is the previous graphics extension from 10.15.1 up to 10.15.4, essentially rolling back changes made by Apple. Regarding the reset-bug, this installation proves relatively benign - a clean shutdown or restart gives the card a full reset.   

 

Catalina 10.15.4

As for the lacking graphics acceleration in the 10.15.7 setup, I went and downloaded a full installation of 10.15.4. (If you just use the base system installer, OSX will download additional files during install and essentially upgrade the whole OS to the latest version in the progress). It turned out that 10.15.4 gives Metal support as well as hardware acceleration to the card. Hackintool reports VDA fully supported and playback of high res H265 video is smooth. However, launching a program like videoproc and testing the acceleration capabilities makes the whole UI almost unuseable laggy which can just mitigated by rebooting. This is a bug which also seems to plague various Mac users. The reset- bug seems more pronounced in this version, too. Restarts make the whole server hang (Web-UI frozen) that a hard restart seems the only solution out. A shutdown requires resetting the card by putting the server to sleep for a few seconds and rescanning PCI-devices after, I did this with @SpaceInvaderOne script, however, the PCI rescan part seemed to not always execute, so I separated it in a second script I run manually after the Server is back up. Generally, it is problematic to be an "unfinished" version of Mac OS, some apps from the appstore would not install on anything below 10.15.6, in that case you had to find your own legacy installers.

 

Mac OS sum up : 

Unfortunately, it seems both versions do not make for a fully useable configuration for above reasons. If anyone has experience or ideas how to further improve above setups, it would be great if you could share. I still wonder if the OpenCore config can be tweaked further to enable hardware acceleration in 10.15.7. The hackintosh forums are sparsely populated with info about this specific card. It seems the Shiki mods in Whatevergreen could be of further help, however it is odd that the Mackie Opencore configurator does not show them as options. It might be related to Shiki allowing for several flag values being added up, hence having static menu entries would make less sense. It is definitely possible though to add these values manually with a plist editor like Propertree, but so far this did not yield improved results. Generally, it definitely helps to slowly build up the VM - Xml configuration by first using VNC and a separate EFI and Mac OS System disk without any PCI or USB devices, then VNC + GPU and finally GPU on its own, keeping previous configurations as a fallback position when things go south. 

 

Windows 10

The card works fine in Windows 10 once the appropriate driver is installed. Regarding reset- bug, as long as a shut down is clean, it is not an issue. When restarting, the card unfortunately also tends to hang. Therefore, I Ieft the VNC in the VM xml config, in case the GPU does not reset, I can at least shut down the VM cleanly and then reset the card with the user-script mentioned above. 

 

Next up, I guess I will dive into upgrading to 6.10RC4 in order to be able to install @ich777 AMD-Reset-plugin. 

 

Let me know if you have comments / thoughts on the above,

 

Many thanks !

Edited March 24, 20224 yr by pho

Did you make any progress? I was about to pull the trigger on this card before reading this