Metal 3 lacking on the AMD Radeon VII

[monoton]

I installed Ventura 13.2 with the help of OCLP 0.6.1. All great and smooth, even got it to load the SMU firmware by following this post:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-scores-use-radeonboost.2231366/post-31763127
That improved the Geekbench 5 metal score by about 50% - i.e. memory bandwidth working at correct speed. Score is about 92000, the M2 Max 38-core is about 86000 as comparison.

Then wrote this small program, which returned false:

import Metal
print( MTLCreateSystemDefaultDevice()!.supportsFamily(.metal3) )

So, there is no Metal 3 support. This was also confirmed by downloading several Metal 3 example codes from the developer site, they all had problems running.
The Pro Vega II, used by Apple in Mac Pro 2019 models (7,1), contains exactly the same chip. Only difference is that the VII is capped at 60 CUs vs. 64.. as they binned the chips going to the "consumer market". And of course, slightly different VBIOS'.

Anyhow, there is no reason Metal 3 support should not be enabled here. I would like to ask if anyone has an idea on how we can reenable it? I am researching it on the little spare time I have these days.

Spoofing as the Pro Vega II could maybe be a solution.. If lucky solve both the Metal 3 and HWAccel issue. Device IDs of relevance:
0x66A11002 Radeon Pro VII/Radeon Instinct MI50 32GB
0x66A31002 Radeon Pro Vega II/Radeon Pro Vega II Duo
0x66A71002 Radeon Pro Vega 20 (for laptops, probably not the one to use)
0x66AF1002 Radeon VII
Guide: https://dortania.github.io/Getting-Started-With-ACPI/Universal/spoof.html

Sidenotes;

• HWAccel would also not enable.. it worked perfectly fine on Monterey. This causes neither Apple TV app nor Netflix to work. Thread of relevance: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/activate-amd-hardware-acceleration.2180095/
• PowerPlay table should be applied for further optimisation.
• Had to set the DirectGopRendering variable in the Open Core config.plist file to true, in order for graphics to render correctly at boot, or render at all. In my case it was completely distorted if not set to true.

 

[galad]

Newer features like mesh shaders require newer hardware. If I remember correctly neither Vulkan nor DirectX 12 implements mesh shaders on Vega.

 

[monoton]

Newer features like mesh shaders require newer hardware. If I remember correctly neither Vulkan nor DirectX 12 implements mesh shaders on Vega.

Pro Vega II uses exact same chip, and it has Metal 3 running. The Vega II cards, probably even Vega cards, are capable.

 

[frou]

I can confirm a that bog standard 1st-gen Vega in an eGPU enclosure with a Mac Mini says it support Metal 3:

 

[Yebubbleman]

That smells to me like a firmware (on the video card) thing. Apple is often picky about what it grants support for certain things to. And that extends to things like video cards where you have a supported GPU and a virtually identical GPU not being supported.

 

[galad]

Oh right, maybe then it's because of OCLP, could it be replacing the Metal drivers with a previous version to avoid avx2 or similar things?

 

[monoton]

Oh right, maybe then it's because of OCLP, could it be replacing the Metal drivers with a previous version to avoid avx2 or similar things?

A similar thought passed my mind... knowing they had to remove AVX 2.0 instructions from graphics drivers - it is likely they borrowed from Monterey.. Hopefully a stop-gap solution, and then the Metal 3 support will arrive when actually using Ventura drivers with removed AVX. I will read the OCLP documentation, and check with the devs. Contacted the main developer about this, but still no answer.

 

[Cristi Ivan]

Hi everyone, Did someone succed enabling HW Accel on Ventura+? Graphics acceleration is working ok in Sequoia with the latest OCLP (rendering etc) but no hardware encoding/decoding)