Unable to use AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 on 2018 MacBook Pro

It seems that a lot of GPU problems revolve around specific versions of drivers. Though AMD has their own support structure, you can often learn from information reported by others who fold.

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smileytechguy
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2016 10:08 pm

Unable to use AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 on 2018 MacBook Pro

Post by smileytechguy »

Hello,

I recently got a new MacBook Pro 15" with a discrete AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 graphics card. I wanted to test it out folding, however, get an error "On client "local" 127.0.0.1:36330: No available GPUs" when attempting to add a GPU core (as none existed from install).

I searched for a GPUs.txt as previous forum threads suggested (for different cards) to add the card manually, however, could not find one on macOS.

Can anyone shed insight on how I could get this card working with F@H? Below is information on the card:

Code: Select all

Radeon Pro Vega 16:
  Chipset Model:	Radeon Pro Vega 16
  Type:	GPU
  Bus:	PCIe
  PCIe Lane Width:	x16
  VRAM (Dynamic, Max):	4080 MB
  Vendor:	AMD (0x1002)
  Device ID:	0x69af
  Revision ID:	0x00c7
  ROM Revision:	113-D2060I-087
  VBIOS Version:	113-D20601MA0L-016
  Option ROM Version:	113-D20601MA0L-016
  EFI Driver Version:	01.01.087
  Automatic Graphics Switching:	Supported
  gMux Version:	5.0.0
  Metal:	Supported, feature set macOS GPUFamily2 v1
Joe_H
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Posts: 7856
Joined: Tue Apr 21, 2009 4:41 pm
Hardware configuration: Mac Pro 2.8 quad 12 GB smp4
MacBook Pro 2.9 i7 8 GB smp2
Location: W. MA

Re: Unable to use AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 on 2018 MacBook Pro

Post by Joe_H »

Using the macOS (OS X) you will not be able to run GPU folding on your MacBook Pro. That is and has been documented in the installation and setup guides since the early version of the V7 folding client. You can find many posts on this forum asking about this, there are responses that go into the history and reasons it is not supported.

The only option to run GPU folding is to install Windows or Linux through Boot Camp.
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iMac 2.8 i7 12 GB smp8, Mac Pro 2.8 quad 12 GB smp6
MacBook Pro 2.9 i7 8 GB smp3
bruce
Posts: 20910
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 10:13 pm
Location: So. Cal.

Re: Unable to use AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 on 2018 MacBook Pro

Post by bruce »

FAHCore_21 is the executable that processes the scientific work on GPUs. FAHClient manages data for FAH. FAHCore_a* processes work for CPUs.

FAHCore_a* and FAHClient have been compiled to run on Windows/Linux/MacOS-X. FAHCore_21 has never been compiled for OS-X.

Whenever a new version of FAHClient or of FAHCore_a* is developed, the standard procedure is to compile for all 3 platforms, work out the bugs that are common to all 3 platforms and then attack the bugs that are unique to 1 or 2 of the platforms. In my experience, working out the bugs that are unique to OS-X always takes the longest time. Based on that (incomplete) information, I expect that working out the bugs on Core_2* for OS-X would be a formidable challenge. (Could be wrong!)

(Then there's also the uncertainty of good vs. poor driver support by ATI and nVidia. In my experience, there are lots of Linux drivers, but many only support Video output, not OpenCL or CUDA ... and Microsoft doesn't do a good job of supporting the drivers that FAH needs, either. )

Now compare the cost of that suggested extra development work plus the cost of future maintenance with the benefit of adding a very few FAH clients.

It's safe to say that Intel GPUs will NOT be supported, so that automatically excludes most OS-X systems.
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