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StarPlayrX / bigmac

Big Mac, macOS 11 Big Sur and macOS Monterey disk installer and back up tool for Intel based Macs
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11.2.3 AMD Radeon 7950 not supported? #137

Closed Ritchie333 closed 3 years ago

Ritchie333 commented 3 years ago

MacPro 3,1, 32GB RAM, AMD Radeon 7950 GPU

Installing 11.2.3 completed but normal boot hangs. Can only start Big Sur in safe mode with no graphics acceleration (and without any keyboard or mouse recognised).

I guess this GPU is no longer supported?

StarPlayrX commented 3 years ago

I have two AMD cards that work out of the box with no need for mouSSE or any issues with drivers, which I have not had to use since Mojave. (I am going to harp on this SSE thing for a bit so please bare with me). These include the RX 580 8GB (Flashed for Mac) and a WX 4100 Workstation card (PC Card).

Safe mode obviously does not use any type of acceleration. However, pointing to the Video Card may not be it, but it could be related to SSE 4.1 not being apart of the 3,1's instruction set. All the AMD cards that I have only need mouSSE on Mojave, but I have read reports of others needing to use it on Catalina and Big Sur. YMMV

It's possible Apple dropped the 7950, but I would check on Mac Rumors.com for sure. I don't keep up with GPUs much anymore. More than likely you need mouSSE for your card.

Since your card is pretty old, I would try installing mouSSE and rebuild the KCs (BigMac2 can do both of these operations). If you have trouble with that, you can try putting Open Core Legacy Patcher onto a USB drive (EFI), and see if you can boot up. It has the ability to patch drivers dynamically using its boot loader. (OCLP also has mouSSE).

Something is obviously preventing your system from booting. What this a clean install or did you upgrade another OS? I recommend clean installs to start.

Also BigSur does not support Bluetooth 2.0 EDR. You may have to either disable that card or remove it.

Hope this helps.

Let me know what does it for you. I'd like to mention that BigMac2 and OCLP can work together and I hope to bring the two more together down the road which we recently got permission to incorporate pending OCLP's approval on the builds. This should in theory (and I have been testing this theory), help most Mac users by a large margin.

Ritchie333 commented 3 years ago

The latest release of BigMac doesn’t have the option to install MOUSSE, so unless so can copy the appropriate kext onto a USB, I’m SOL. Given the tests I’ve done, and since the boot sequence is fine through initial startup up to starting Quartz, and runs in safe mode, I would say that’s the lack of SSE instructions for the AMD driver is the most likely issue.

IIRC the 7950 was never intended to be supported beyond High Sierra; indeed, on Catalina only the DisplayPort outputs work, while on HS, the DVI and HDMI outputs work too. So it’s kind of lucky it works at all.

I suspect the RX580 has got improved drivers as it’s the base card in the contemporary Mac Pro.

StarPlayrX commented 3 years ago

The latest release of BigMac doesn’t have the option to install MOUSSE, so unless so can copy the appropriate kext onto a USB, I’m SOL. Given the tests I’ve done, and since the boot sequence is fine through initial startup up to starting Quartz, and runs in safe mode, I would say that’s the lack of SSE instructions for the AMD driver is the most likely issue.

IIRC the 7950 was never intended to be supported beyond High Sierra; indeed, on Catalina only the DisplayPort outputs work, while on HS, the DVI and HDMI outputs work too. So it’s kind of lucky it works at all.

I suspect the RX580 has got improved drivers as it’s the base card in the contemporary Mac Pro.

I can add MoUSSE back in. You could put OCLP on a thumb drive and see if it boots up your system with video acceleration. That would be the quickest test.

StarPlayrX commented 3 years ago

Also did you run the Telemetry fix from bigmac? That should still be there.

Ritchie333 commented 3 years ago

Okay, I managed to boot off OCLP, but the installer still hung. However, I then booted again into the EFI shell, ran boot.efi -v to force verbose, and the installer completed! So I guess that's the answer - always boot verbose. I'm not sure why this card (and it might just be this card, not 7950s generally) hangs on graphical boot, but as long as I can log in and use the Mac, I'm easy.

Screenshot 2021-09-02 at 21 28 41

StarPlayrX commented 3 years ago

Not sure what is up with that card. I have a WX4100 Workstation Radeon 4GB card and an RX580 8GB. The RX580 doesn't have full support under mojave. Have not tried the 4100 on Mojave yet.

Ritchie333 commented 3 years ago

Yeah, I'm coming to the conclusion it's the card, so I'll close this out as "not an issue".

(I did chuckle at the notification saying "Take a quick tour to learn more about your new Mac Pro" when it's been used by my kids who are younger than it.)

Ritchie333 commented 3 years ago

Closed - suspected hardware issue, nothing to do with bigmac.