Finding a Safe Mac OS GPU for VMs

One of the most common questions we get is: “what gpu should I use for a Mac OS VM,” and it’s frankly a hard one to answer.

Nvidia is essentially out of the question at this point, assuming you want to use a new release of their operating system, and new AMD cards don’t work well with UEFI Passthrough. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

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Our VFIO Increments Page is generally OK to follow for macs, but as picky as OS X can be about supported cards, it’s good to err on the side of caution. This is an addendum to the Increments page specifically for Mac OS GPU Selection

So, What AMD GPUs Aren’t Safe?

As far as we can tell from our (extensive) research, Hawaii cards (The R9 290, 290X, 390, and 390X) are the first cards that shipped with the reset bug. All newer cards, including Vega and the 5700 are affected, and won’t reset properly in a VM. Apple Drivers support the RX 400 and 500 series as well as Vega/Fury Cards, but it isn’t advisable to pick one up unless you never plan on rebooting your VM.

Narrowing things down Further, we know that cards too old to support UEFI Boot won’t work either, except for the special UGA variants pulled from or made for old mac pros, but those end support in 10.14 Mojave, so they aren’t worth talking about.

So where does that leave us?

Explicitly Supported Cards

Well, Apple explicitly lists exactly 1 “metal capable” reset bug free card in their Mojave announcement:

• The SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7950

However, the drivers mojave ships with with support many cards out of the box as well. Mac OS is finnicky and won’t work if you don’t have an exact PCIe ID match, so, buyer beware, but generally we feel safe recommending these models:

• Any 7950/70 or 280/X that supports UEFI boot *
• Any 7850/70 or 270/X that supports UEFI boot *
• Any Firepro Card Based on CGN 1.0 that supports UEFI boot **

[*] XFX Cards can cause kernel panics on some models, the brand should generally be avoided
[**] The models that fit this description are: The Firepro W7000, 8000, 9000, and D300, 500, 700 Cards. The D Series was designed specifically for Macs.

You can check if your card supports UEFI boot on the Tom’s Hardware VBIOS Archives. You may want to pass a supported rom or update to the most recent vbios as well to make sure you have a revision that will work, because some cards from this era did not ship with UEFI support.

There’s also one possible exception to the “Newer than Hawaii” rule for the reset bug: The Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Pulse (Model SKU 11265-05-20G) — these cards were shipped with the Apple eGPU dev kits and we’ve had at least a few reports of successful resets with this model. We’re not giving it a hard recommendation because of the issues with other polaris cards, but it’s definitely worth trying and reporting back to us if you do already own this model. 

The reason we don’t recommend 300 series cards is, while the apple drivers do support some of them, they seem to have PCIe ID mismatches more often than the older rebrands, so support varies on a model-by-model basis.

Lower end GCN 1.0 cards in the 7000 and 200 series can work as well, but often weren’t supported well or long enough to get a UEFI Boot bios update. If you already own one, though, it can’t hurt to look up if your model got a support update. We’ll be working on a patch guide as well, for those that already own a GCN 1.0 card with no UEFI support that still want to use their cards for Mac OS.

In addition to these conservative recommendations, Community member and MacOS-Simple-KVM Maintainer, Foxlet, Has compiled a list of explicitly supported PCI IDs in the Mac OS graphics drivers.

Some of these IDs do not match any known AMD device, so if you have a card that matches one with ??? in the model field, please contact us:

Apple Supported Device IDs

Just because your GPU has the same Identifier as one of the IDs listed here does NOT necessarily mean it will work out of the box. Check to make sure the id matches by running lspci -nnk | grep VGA and cross referencing its output by searching for it in this document (ctrl +f.)

Even a matching ID does not guarantee functionality. Laptop GPUs will be difficult to set up and probably won’t work on the laptop’s built in monitor, because Apple uses custom muxing hardware in their implementations of those devices. In addition, cards with the reset bug or without UEFI Boot support out of the box will be a lot more trouble.

We’ll be working on populating this list with known good SKUs, so if you try one and have success, be sure to let us know in the discord or via email.

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Images via Pixabay, special thanks to Foxlet for his tremendous help in Compiling the ID table