Hardware acceleration on MacBook Air Retina 2018 w/ Sonnet eGfx TB3 RX560

[EvilMonk]

Hi guys, I recently got a deal on a Sonnet RX 560 TB3 Puck for 120$ so I bought it for my MBA retina 2018. I just manage to get H264 encoding for now shouldn’t I also get HEVC on GCN 4.0 GPUs? With my RX 580 in my Mac Pro I get both H264 and HEVC (with opencore) but from what I managed to understand, it’s not possible to install opencore on a T2 enable computer… is it still possible to enable HEVC on my Sonnet RX 560 puck in TB3 with my MBA retina 2018? Thanks guys

 

[joevt]

My Mac mini 2018 has a T2 but it run's OpenCore. I think I used OCLP to create the OpenCore EFI on an external USB drive.

 

[EvilMonk]

Wow I spent so much time reading and trying stuff and never got it to work… when you say OCLP you mean the GUI legacy patcher? I’ll give it a try then ??? thanks a lot

 

[joevt]

I usually use the text version of OCLP. For the Mac mini 2018, I do the following from the menus:

- Patcher Settings
    - Allow OpenCore on native Models
    - Quit
- Build OpenCore

Then I manually copy the parts to the EFI partition and bless the boot.efi file in the /Volumes/EFI/System/Library/CoreServices folder. But I think the "Install OpenCore to USB/internal drive" should work. You may need to disable SIP first? Add Lilu and WhateverGreen if they're not included to the kexts folder and to config.plist (just like how they are in the MacPro5,1) if they're not included.
I don't know anything about the acceleration stuff.

 

[EvilMonk]

I usually use the text version of OCLP. For the Mac mini 2018, I do the following from the menus:

- Patcher Settings
    - Allow OpenCore on native Models
    - Quit
- Build OpenCore

Then I manually copy the parts to the EFI partition and bless the boot.efi file in the /Volumes/EFI/System/Library/CoreServices folder. But I think the "Install OpenCore to USB/internal drive" should work. You may need to disable SIP first? Add Lilu and WhateverGreen if they're not included to the kexts folder and to config.plist (just like how they are in the MacPro5,1) if they're not included.
I don't know anything about the acceleration stuff.

Thank you so much, I’ll give it a try and see if it works ?

 

[06tb06]

I just manage to get H264 encoding for now shouldn’t I also get HEVC on GCN 4.0 GPUs?

GCN 4.0 supports HEVC (H.265) at the silicon level featuring hardware encode/decode. My 2017 iMac with RX 400 series supported it as I was able to play HEVC content in Quicktime player.

My 2019 MBP also has the T2 chip. I'm pretty sure the T2 has appropriate HEVC decoding as well, as apps such as FCP can utilize the functionality for exporting HEVC content. I'm not sure how Apple prioritizes GCN video capabilities over that of the T2 chip, or which gets fully utilized. My 2017 iMac didn't have the T2 chip so the video work had to default the the GCN chipset.

 

[EvilMonk]

GCN 4.0 supports HEVC (H.265) at the silicon level featuring hardware encode/decode. My 2017 iMac with RX 400 series supported it as I was able to play HEVC content in Quicktime player.

My 2019 MBP also has the T2 chip. I'm pretty sure the T2 has appropriate HEVC decoding as well, as apps such as FCP can utilize the functionality for exporting HEVC content. I'm not sure how Apple prioritizes GCN video capabilities over that of the T2 chip, or which gets fully utilized. My 2017 iMac didn't have the T2 chip so the video work had to default the the GCN chipset.

It’s what I thought as well, thanks for the pointers I’ll search more on the T2 / iGPU vs RX560 priorities ?