RX 480 Issues


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When installing the RX 480 drivers it gets to the display driver point then instead of the display flickering and coming back it just goes black and loses connection. The VM will not shutdown via browser and has to be crashed. I can VNC back to the VM  and remove the drivers using DDU to get it to pull up again through the card. Is this an issue with UnRaid, the drivers, or the card? I previously was running a 6670 and it worked fine.

 

 

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I can't even get my RX480 to pass through at all. I just get a blank screen on the output, but the VM boots because I am able to vnc into it. And when I do log in via vnc it doesnt detect the graphics card. Device manager just shows Microsoft Basic Display adapter.

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I can't even get my RX480 to pass through at all. I just get a blank screen on the output, but the VM boots because I am able to vnc into it. And when I do log in via vnc it doesnt detect the graphics card. Device manager just shows Microsoft Basic Display adapter.

 

Is it showing up in the Edit VM page as the right card? Did you have a working VM with GPU passthrough before the RX480 (and was it this VM)? Have you tried to download the Radeon Crimson package directly from AMD prior to install? And finally, What OS is the VM (8.1 has been spotty on bare metal installs)?

 

My XFX 1288Mhz 480 is in transit and I am super pumped, so I hope I can help fix ya'll's issues so I won't have them too ;-)

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Is it showing up in the Edit VM page as the right card? Did you have a working VM with GPU passthrough before the RX480 (and was it this VM)? Have you tried to download the Radeon Crimson package directly from AMD prior to install? And finally, What OS is the VM (8.1 has been spotty on bare metal installs)?

 

My XFX 1288Mhz 480 is in transit and I am super pumped, so I hope I can help fix ya'll's issues so I won't have them too ;-)

 

This VM was working fine with an Nvidia Titan X passed through. The only thing I changed was the GPU. The RX480 does show up in Edit VM and that's what I have selected. The OS is windows 10.

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I just got my XFX-1288 RX480 card from Newegg, and it installed without major issues. It showed up as a Polaris 10 in the VM Edit window, and worked out of the box, mostly. The display was wonky and I had to guess-navigate to my radeon crimson installer, but once I started that and the new drivers loaded, no problems at all.

 

If you are VNC'ing into the card, I don't think the card is passed through—I think that it is all one or the other. (Unless you have VNC server software in the VM). I am kind of guessing on this, admittedly. Other possibles (and I'm just going down the checklist, so some are basic): Make sure you saved the new definition on the VM Edit page (I've hit cancel when I thought I hit save before); maybe try downloading the driver again, and they are about to drop a new one in the next 48 hours; or maybe it just isn't seated properly.

 

 

I'll keep trying to help if I can. Right now I'm going to go check benchmarks against my old R5 220 (it's a laughable difference).

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When I use VNC it isn't through unraid, I have a vnc server installed on the windows 10 VM. Are you using it in the first PCIe slot or a secondary one? I've tried both without success on either. The Nvidia Titan X was on a secondary PCIe slot due to issues with passing through on primary PCIe slot and nvidia cards.

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Ntacus, did you ever get this running? Have you tried uninstalling the VNC? or maybe repairing windows?

 

I have had one issue with my card and that's on boot up the windows splash screen (not the lock screen) is a negative image, but that's not operationally important and it works great other than that.

 

My system is in my sig, and I also have an R5-220 that I am passing through to another VM at the same time and both are working great.

 

If it's working great, if not, post system info and let's see if we can get it working....(although I just thought what if the card is bad? maybe?)

 

Hope it's working.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

I have a similar issue to yours.  I traded out a NV 760 GTX for a RX 480.  Used DDU to clear drivers, and whenever the AMD driver takes during install the screen goes off.  I am different in that:

 

-My VM is still functional, as I can VNC into it and SPICE still works for keyboard / mouse control

-I am not actually using unRAID (standard qemu/kvm on Gentoo 4.4.6)

-I had the borked colors issue (going into TianoCore / OVMF config screen and resaving the device drivers eliminates this color corruption)

 

One possible solution is that the HDMI audio drivers are causing issues.  Remove the HDMI audio part of the RX 480 from your VM config to test (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/381108-33-solved-graphics-error-code).  This didn't work for me.

 

I have a whole drive dedicated to Windows 8.1, and as a result can boot my VM directly ("bare metal").  I had no drivers issues when doing this.  This tells me that it has something to do with the virtualized environment.  While my first attempt at getting the drivers to work was under nVidia settings (kvm=off) the rest were not.  I may have to revisit that...

 

My RX 480 is from PowerColor

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Just an FYI, AMD GPUs are notoriously more difficult to assign to virtual machines for local graphics output.  This is well documented on our site and has been the case for some time.  That doesn't mean that they won't work, but it does mean you are taking a bigger risk buying one than most NVIDIA GPUs which tend to work much better for most people.  What's odd is that this seems even more true with newer AMD GPUs than older ones.  I have multiple older series AMD devices that worked flawless, but we've had nothing but challenges trying to use the R9 290 and even the Fury devices.  We even had a full blog post on all the challenges we faced when working with Linus on the 7 gamers project which used those AMD GPUs.

 

Wish you the best of luck getting this to work.  Try the suggestions in this thread and our wiki and see what happens.

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@jonp:  oh, NOW you tell me ;-)

 

-I was able to produce a VBIOS from the card itself--specifying it in libvirt XML config produced no change

-I tried using the VBIOS from techpowerup.com (184327/AMD.RX480.8192.160603.rom).  This hung the VM at BIOS loadup

 

For the record, the MD5's:

 

7fd9be65faf6636ac78968d702c30bd6  AMD.RX480.8192.160603.rom        (techpowerup's)

82a5ea3730a0b7b62a3e9abbb5206c99  /home/vm/amd-vbios.rom              (dumped ROM)

 

-I read there are some issues with AMD cards and version of qemu prior to ~2.3.  I am running 2.7, so that shouldn't be an issue

-I checked in Win8.1 about the MSI Interrupt mode, which is set to messaging (MSISupported = 0x00000001). 

 

Next step are

  1)  Check for an updated VBIOS / firmware from the manufacturer

  2)  Trying using the VBIOS from one of the reference RX 480's

  2b) Check your wiki :)

  3)  Check  if setting the card back to signaling interrupt mode helps (read that it can help somewhere)

  4) Try using the old VGA way (vs. OVMF+EFI, which is the current).  This will require either the vga arbtrator patch for my Haswell (i915) chipset or reinstalling the 760GTX (and burning more electricity) and disabling onboard video.

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FIXED

 

The problem was with using q35 chipset.  Changed to i440fx (pc-i440fx-2.7) and made the pcie-root hub a pci-root hub and all works.  I did have to reboot once as I believe the first boot was expecting Win8.1 to be on bare hardware again, but after the reboot we're back in business (and without the hypervisor hiding stuff)

 

Note:  I'm also using intel_iommu=pt vs intel_iommu=on.  There are some discussions about this being better for performance on some chipsets

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I have been using my reference RX480 since release, and have had some "challenges" with stability, but those tend to revolve around updates, so I have learned to be vigilant about backing up. Otherwise my 480 kills.

 

It would probably behoove me to go through all of the potential tweaks and settings to improve stability, and maybe someday when I have time I will trudge through all of the forum posts to find them and do that (and collect them for the next person).

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  • 1 month later...

Continuation of https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=50086.msg508457#msg508457

 

After a recent emerge libvirt was updated to 2.3 and qemu to 2.7.  Once these were in place the VM would no longer show up in virt-manager.  I found out that simply setting the machine back to i440fx and switching the pcie-root to pci-root is no longer sufficient.  All of the other bridge devices (I had an additional dmi-to-pci bridge and a pci-bridge) had to be removed [these are pcie to pci type devices and a bug was probably fixed so they are not handled  or silently ignored under i440fx anymore].

 

Once this change was made I had to:

  1) boot the VM, go into the OVMF SeaBIOS and resave the OVMF configuration (despite making no changes).

  2) Reboot the VM and load Windows.  Once Windows was up it took some time to rediscover all the pci-passthrough devices (~ 5 min) and find the apply the appropriate drivers (including the RX 480). 

  3)  Once that was done I rebooted once more and everything was back to normal.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

If you go with a NVIDIA card, you accept the risk that nVidia has been trying to force anyone who uses PCI Passthrough with something other than a $1K Quattro is violating their TOS.  They have numerous things they have put in their Windows drivers to make it not work (for instance, you can't tell windows to use any of the HyperV extensions that optimize Windows in a VM).  What they do in the future is unknown, but combined with Windows 10's mandatory updates, you may not be able to control what that is or when it will affect you.

 

A little headache to avoid that and get better performance with AMD was, for me, worth it.

 

EDIT:  AMD is contributing to a completely open source driver which is now in the mainline Linux kernel tree (the AMDGPU driver).  Due to this, I would not expect such hi-jinks in the future from AMD.  Heck, perhaps they will even get the AMDGPU driver to gracefully release from the host for use in the VM in the future!

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thanks xuare.. Never knew nvidia had TOS of this kind.. I have always used amd gpus and my experience has been good even though it was sometimes a hassel to get it working in linux, but that was many years back.. I will go with amd itself then.. Probably will be posting soon if i get into problem with rx480

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  • 4 weeks later...

I found this thread when looking to purchase an RX480 to use in passthrough and it made me a bit nervous on getting an AMD GPU.  I took a chance due to a good sale price and wanted to share my experience in case anyone else finds this in a search.

 

I bought an 8GB Gigabyte G1 Gaming RX480 card.  I had an existing VM running Seabios and Q35-2.5 with an older Nvidia card which this replaced.  When I first booted and tried to install the drivers, the screen would flash a couple times and then stay blank. I had to Force stop and reboot but still would not install.  I then switched to i440fx-2.5.  Drivers installed just fine and I'm very impressed with the overall performance of this card.  No reset issues and boots up fine even after a force stop.  I assume it will work under OVMF too but have not tried yet.  Just FYI...

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Awesome!

 

I am using  OVMF / UEFI.  I have to because of i915 Intel graphics for host--otherwise have VGA arbiter issues and need to patch the kernel.  No issues to date (that are graphics related anyway).

 

I will also add that my HDMI audio seems more stable under AMD than nVidia, but that may just be perception on my part...

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