iMac 2011(27 with i5) GPU upgrade to w6170m experience

[DeletteUA]

Hello,

Here what I did:

iMac 27 2011 with upgraded videoCard to w6170m with a flashed GOP Bios from the post about gpu upgrade + hdd replaced to ssd

The goal:

1. replace faulty video card and get black theme
2. fully working at least one external display
3. fully working airplay

Here what I tried:

1. OCLP patcher with Monterrey/Big Sur -> I just got a chance to select booting device and that's all:

airplay - does not work
external display - does not work + internal display goes black and the only way to make it work - reboot by pressing shut down button
(at least 5 reinstallation of OS with different oclp config)

2. dosdude - only one attempt for installing with Catalina - airplay appears in the sound but no airplay icon for video

I did not tried with big sur this sing, maybe it will work too but I got all what I needed

Spoiler: here is the solution

MacBook Pro 8,1 (late 2011), Sandy Bridge CPU, Same problem, followed by solution for Intel HD3000




Symptoms: no AirPlay logo on status bar, no AirPlay Display drop-down menu in Display Preferences, but AirPlay devices are listed in Sound Preferences as possible options for sound output:



When playing a YouTube video in Safari, AirPlay mirroring option appears and actually WORKS:



After investing a lot of time to research the possible reason, I finally found a solution.

The reason why this happening is actually because AirPlay mirroring requires hardware acceleration to be correctly detected by operating system.

It happens that after clean Catalina install using macos-catalina-patcher, though Intel HD3000 hardware acceleration works perfectly, VDA H.264 hardware decoding/encoding is not working (or at least it is not correctly identified by operating system).

To check this, you can use tools like VDADecoderCheck, VideoProc's Hardware Info, but I would suggest latest release of Hackintool - https://github.com/headkaze/Hackintool/releases/tag/3.5.3

Hackintool will report that "VDA Decoder failed", "Hardware acceleration is not available", same as VDADecoderCheck. VideoProc will also report that both H264 and HEVC hardware decoder/encoder and video processing acceleration are not available.

To fix the problem, you can download and install latest release versions of two well-known kexts: Lilu.kext and WhateverGreen.kext - just put them to /Library/Extensions and follow regular kext install procedure.

For those who could find this post using Google: if you are unfamiliar with installing kexts manually, fixing kext permissions, rebuilding kext caches etc. and just need simple instructions to make it work, here they are:

1. Create a folder AirPlayFix in your Downloads folder.
2. Download Lilu.kext
3. Download WhateverGreen.kext
4. unzip Lilu-1.5.1-RELEASE.zip and WhateverGreen-1.4.8-RELEASE.zip
5. Copy or move Lilu.kext and WhateverGreen.kext from their respected unzipped folders to AirPlayFix folder:

1. Download, install and launch Hackintool, go to Utilities tab and use Install kext(s) button:

1. Select Lilu.kext and WhateverGreen.kext:

1. When prompted for destination, select /Library/Extensions, wait for the process to finish, then reboot.

Result should be like this:





(It's ok in my particular situation for HEVC to be unavailable since my CPU/GPU don't support HEVC acceleration)

And finally what we were fighting for: