Hello all,

 

Any thoughts on why I might be getting sparkly coloured snow-like artifacts in my Windows VM? It only seems to show up in darker areas, and doesn't always appear. I only noticed it for the first time while watching Youtube.

 

Also, it wasn't appearing in the YouTube video, just in surrounding regions outside of the video frame. Full sizing the video functioned perfectly.

 

No other issues currently. I had a heck of a time installing the card though. With VNC, VM was rock solid. As soon as I added the card, it would reboot within minutes of booting. I finally logged in via VNC, installed the stable Radeon drivers, shut down, re-added the card (and removed VNC), and booted up. No more reboots... yet. I may just return this card and get an nvidia-based one.... Which is too bad, because it plays fairly well with macOS Sierra.

 

Specs are in my signature. This is with an AMD RX460 4GB video card.

Hello all,

 

Any thoughts on why I might be getting sparkly coloured snow-like artifacts in my Windows VM? It only seems to show up in darker areas, and doesn't always appear. I only noticed it for the first time while watching Youtube.

 

Also, it wasn't appearing in the YouTube video, just in surrounding regions outside of the video frame. Full sizing the video functioned perfectly.

 

No other issues currently. I had a heck of a time installing the card though. With VNC, VM was rock solid. As soon as I added the card, it would reboot within minutes of booting. I finally logged in via VNC, installed the stable Radeon drivers, shut down, re-added the card (and removed VNC), and booted up. No more reboots... yet. I may just return this card and get an nvidia-based one.... Which is too bad, because it plays fairly well with macOS Sierra.

 

Specs are in my signature. This is with an AMD RX460 4GB video card.

My first thought when ever I see sparkly coloured snow-like artifacts is bad video ram.  Does the card work in a bare-metal box properly?

Yes, i agree with Squid, you often see artefacts with GPUs when they start to fail. The solder gets hairline fractures in it due to the heat and therefore the GPU doesn't work well. That's what happened to the Xbox 360s a lot. You can reflow GPUs and they work fine. in fact did it last week for a friends 2011 mac book pro that was doing the same.

 

Anyway, your card is new so doubtful if this is the problem. Play the something on youtube when passed through to sierra for 10 minutes. Do you get the same result?

 

Also, try dumping the vbios and passing that with the card and see if that improves the situation.

 

If you return the card and get an Nvidia, please be aware that the pascal 10 series do not work with osx. But the maxwell Nvidia work fine with the Nvidia web drivers.

 

 

 

Thanks for the replies, gents! I haven't tried it in a bare metal box yet, but I'm leaning more toward just RMAing it.

 

The fact that it has been so difficult to even get installed makes me very leery to keep it. I've never had a video card that would crash a machine when installing the drivers, and it makes me wonder if it's just not compatible with my hardware.

 

Anyone have thoughts on a decent gpu under $200 that would work well (make and model)? I actually tried a Zotac GTX 950 and it worked a treat in Windows, but I could not get it working in Sierra. It may have come down to the brand though. Gigabyte seems well supported in the Mac world.... I'm hoping for something that works out-of-the-box.

 

Also, I have no iGPU, so if Sierra requires one, I'd rather skip that card as well. The 460 requires one, and though it's not the end of the world, having to unplug the hdmi cable during boot in order to enable the card is onerous.

 

Sigh. This whole VM thing sounds so easy when you read the jacket cover, but actually getting it to work is proving a bit more challenging... At least it's fun though

 

I really think your problems with the GPU are because you have no igpu. So the 460 is the card that displays your unRAID console?

Although AMD cards do often work in primary slot with no igpu, they can have problems.

When the server boots, whichever GPU , is the primary (unraid console out) the vbios gets shadowed. So when you come to pass it through to a VM this can cause problems. Nvidia cards will just display a black screen when primary.

The way around this is to add the ROM file to the VM in the XML file.

Have you tried adding the ROM file? If so how did you get the ROM file? Downloading from techpower up will not work as the way the bioses there are dumped, is using gpuz, which doesn't give a compatiable bios for us. It must be done at the command line. I have done a video here about it http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=52960.msg509057#msg509057 

 

Regarding Sierra. Most Nvidia maxwells should work fine. I use an MSI 750 ti on mine and it works very well. For all Nvidia cards, you will have to use the Nvidia web drivers to make it work. You also have to make a few changes in clover as well once web drivers are installed. The new pascal cards don't work in os x at all.

 

I really think your problems with the GPU are because you have no igpu. So the 460 is the card that displays your unRAID console?

Although AMD cards do often work in primary slot with no igpu, they can have problems.

When the server boots, whichever GPU , is the primary (unraid console out) the vbios gets shadowed. So when you come to pass it through to a VM this can cause problems. Nvidia cards will just display a black screen when primary.

 

I don't have an igpu on the cpu, but the motherboard does have a basic vga output that unraid uses. Could that be a problem? I've tried adding it to my xml in Windows and Sierra as a helper gpu, but that makes the whole server very unhappy and usually leads to a complete reboot .

 

The way around this is to add the ROM file to the VM in the XML file.

Have you tried adding the ROM file? If so how did you get the ROM file? Downloading from techpower up will not work as the way the bioses there are dumped, is using gpuz, which doesn't give a compatiable bios for us. It must be done at the command line. I have done a video here about it http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=52960.msg509057#msg509057 

 

I've done this with the HD 7770 that I already had, to get it to work in Sierra, but to no avail. That said, it does not have a uefi bios, so I figured that must be the problem. I also tried using a uefi bios supplied by techpowerup, but again, no dice (Now I know why!). I considered flashing the board with another uefi bios, but not sure if that would brick my card (because it is a non-uefi card - hardware limitation?).

 

The 460 worked great with Sierra (other than the unplugging the cable irritation), but I didn't test it enough to see if it had the sparklies as well. The fact that it was such a difficult card to get working under Windows 10 makes me think I should probably RMA it back... That said, I'll extract the vbios and include it in xml for windows to see. Do you think that might help with the crashing during installation as well as the sparkles?

 

 

Regarding Sierra. Most Nvidia maxwells should work fine. I use an MSI 750 ti on mine and it works very well. For all Nvidia cards, you will have to use the Nvidia web drivers to make it work. You also have to make a few changes in clover as well once web drivers are installed. The new pascal cards don't work in os x at all.

 

Any chance you could you point me to a resource for these clover changes?

 

Also, speaking of Clover, I tried upgrading it to a newer version, hoping that might help. but the options in the customize have changed from the one you provide in your Sierra package. If you have a minute, I'd love to know which boxes need to be checked for the newest version!

 

Thanks for all the help!

Hi,

 

Did you ever manage to resolve this issue? I have an AMD RX460 GPU and Windows 10 VM's keep having display issues, when it loads the display has lines all over it and as you move the mouse or try to use the keyboard this gets worse and worse until eventually you can't see anything at all. VNC versions work fine, so does Ubuntu.

 

I have tried changing the BIOS to seabios and the Machine type to the Q35 option but I have the same results. I came across another post that recommended adding the rom file to the xml which I did but this is from techpower, I will try the process to get a rom from the GPU this weekend when I can borrow a 2nd GPU to do this.

 

Which VM settings did you have success with?

 

Thanks for any help and advice that you might have.

 

Michael

Hi,

 

Did you ever manage to resolve this issue? I have an AMD RX460 GPU and Windows 10 VM's keep having display issues, when it loads the display has lines all over it and as you move the mouse or try to use the keyboard this gets worse and worse until eventually you can't see anything at all. VNC versions work fine, so does Ubuntu.

 

I have tried changing the BIOS to seabios and the Machine type to the Q35 option but I have the same results. I came across another post that recommended adding the rom file to the xml which I did but this is from techpower, I will try the process to get a rom from the GPU this weekend when I can borrow a 2nd GPU to do this.

 

Which VM settings did you have success with?

 

Thanks for any help and advice that you might have.

 

Michael

 

Hi Michael,

 

Your timing is excellent. I haven't had much time to work on the server over the last while, and last night I was finally able to spend some time on it. I had ordered another video card (750ti) on Black Friday and was hoping it would solve my video artifacts issue...

 

Sadly, it did not... Thinking it must be something else entirely, and not the video card itself, I started googling around, and came across a post about someone having video artifact issues that ended up being caused by a bad hdmi cable issue... Which got me thinking...

 

Turns out in my case the problem was the 50' hdmi cable I bought works great, but awhile back I added a 3' extension to mimic it coming from a wall plate, and it appears that the extra 3' were just too much distance for my non-active cable (and the extra connector probably adds to the overall noise). As soon as I removed the extension and the extra cable, my video artifacts in Windows were gone!

 

I'm going to have to re-install the rx460 to see if this affects the driver installation  issues I was having (I doubt it will, but it's worth a quick test).

 

If I manage to get the 460 stable, I'll let you know what combination of bios/machine type worked for me. As it stands, I tried the default, as well as q35, and the driver install issue was always there.

Hi,

 

Thanks for the update, I have tried outputting the rom from the RX460 and adding this via the xml, this has not resolved the issue. I'm still getting screen tearing that makes it impossible to use the system.

Just to let you know I have VM's running with GPU pass through now. To do this i run unRAID in headless mode and the GPU pass through is great. I also added the vbios to the xml file for the vm's.

Just to let you know I have VM's running with GPU pass through now. To do this i run unRAID in headless mode and the GPU pass through is great. I also added the vbios to the xml file for the vm's.

 

Great to hear! Glad to hear you succeeded!

 

I finally gave up on the RX460. It just did not like my system. The last time I tried it, it completely crashed the whole server. Maybe I got a bad card?

 

That said, I finally have a stable reliable dual VM system running. I ended up using my old HD 7770 for my Windows VM (It wouldn't work with macOS because it is not have a uefi bios), and I bought a cheap GT 710 for macOS. Both vms boot up without issue and work great .