38 replies to this topic

[DK-RendeR]

I've been having a problem with my 6870 (HD-687A-ZNFC) running under Lion (currently 10.7.3). This card is completely stock and I haven't flashed it. I had used it for about 6 months in another Windows machine with no problems whatsoever.

If I turn my monitor off and back on, sometimes it will flash a white screen at me every 4 seconds. This will continue until I restart my machine or put it to sleep and wake it again. My system is setup as a file server, and having to restart/sleep constantly is a real big hassle.

There is also the odd time where I get no display after attempting to wake my system up and have to power off and back on.

The other problem is with my mini-DP port. Booting my system, the display is fine. Once I load into Lion, the screen is fairly distorted. I can fix it by unplugging the mini-DP cable and plugging it back in again. The problem does come back if I restart the machine. For now I've been using DVI without any problems. I wouldn't mind solving this issue, though I'm hoping it might be related to my other issues.

My big questions are: Is this a kext issue? Or is this firmware related? I can't imagine it would be the actual hardware since it worked fine in a Windows system while gaming.

Can anyone shed some insight?

Essential system specs:
Core i7-950 (no overclocking for now)
ASUS Rampage III Gene w/ DSDT
12GB DDR3-1600 RAM
XFX HD-687A-ZNFC HD 6870 1GB
Crucial M4 256 SSD

[TH3L4UGH1NGM4N]

hey there, for starters which fram buffer are you using with your card?  If its OS X only it could be a frame buffer related issue.

[DK-RendeR]

TH3L4UGH1NGM4N, on 16 May 2012 - 10:12 PM, said:

hey there, for starters which fram buffer are you using with your card?  If its OS X only it could be a frame buffer related issue.

Duckweed.

Edit: Should clarify that it's auto-detected and set by Chameleon. I've manually changed to other FBs in the past and none of them work as well as Duckweed.

[TH3L4UGH1NGM4N]

Have you did any connector edits to get all ports working via Duckweed? Or are you just loading up the FB with no changes done to it.

[DK-RendeR]

No edits at all to make anything on this card work. It was pretty much out of the box working for me (installed using 10.7.3 app.)

[TH3L4UGH1NGM4N]

Okay I can give you my modified 6000controller to try out assuming your port layout is 2x DVI - HDMI - 2x miniDP  (be sure to backup your existing one in the event this doesn't workout).  Install do the permission setting and what not, restart, and then at the boot prompt type AtiPorts=5 and AtiConfig=Gibba to load up the Gibba framebuffer which I modified for my 6870 to work.

http://cl.ly/3m210d0i3R3x2N1t0N1h

[DK-RendeR]

TH3L4UGH1NGM4N, on 17 May 2012 - 01:35 AM, said:

Okay I can give you my modified 6000controller to try out assuming your port layout is 2x DVI - HDMI - 2x miniDP  (be sure to backup your existing one in the event this doesn't workout).  Install do the permission setting and what not, restart, and then at the boot prompt type AtiPorts=5 and AtiConfig=Gibba to load up the Gibba framebuffer which I modified for my 6870 to work.

http://cl.ly/3m210d0i3R3x2N1t0N1h

I really appreciate you helping me with this. Your kext and boot flags seems to be working! Obviously, I haven't tested it for an extended period of time, but I was expecting the issue to occur this morning when I used the computer and it didn't happen. I will test again when I get home for lunch.

I understand the change in framebuffer, but what were the changes you made to the kext? Is the kext needed to run that framebuffer on this card?

Edit: Also worth mentioning, Unigine Heaven benchmarks the card at the same score as the original kext and framebuffer.

[TH3L4UGH1NGM4N]

No problem man always glad to help out.  The changes that I made to the to the kext was how the framebuffer had the ports was incorrect so it would only detect certain ports and not all of them dunno why Apple made it like this.  There's a few guides that def helped me along the way with making the hex changes and once I fixed them to fit my gpu viola!  My gpu just started working with no issues. (although I'm yet to test out the mini DP ports I've tested the hdmi and both dvi *note dual monitors only works for on the top DVI port + HDMI because the top DVI port is a DVI DL while the bottom DVI port is a single link DVI port)  The bench scores shouldn't really change that much also because I haven't witnessed a performance hit since editing the kext just good stuff has come from it.

I'll get a chance to test the miniDP once I get me an active converter so I can go beyond my dual monitor setup.

[DK-RendeR]

After a week of testing, things are fantastic.

I did some testing without the modified ATi kext, but still specifying the ports and framebuffer in Chameleon. I only use one monitor, so I wasn't able to test multi-display, but my original issues are gone. The flashing problem vanished and a long-standing issue with screen sharing to this computer causing frequent kernel panicks is gone as well.

My system is stable as humanly possible now. Thank you

[TH3L4UGH1NGM4N]

Ah sweet glad to see your issues are all out the window now that's always a good thing to hear. Stable as human possible? I think I'd rather mine as stable as a machine since humans are a bunch of unstable beings

You're welcome.

[kernnell]

Before this modified kext my sapphire 6870 worked OOB, identifying as 6xxx with dual monitor support and full QE/CI, whoever, i had frame buffer issues with Adobe after effects CS6 crashing on start.
Just with GraficsEnabler=Yes, ATIconfig=Dukweed and AtiPorts=4 it identified correctly in lion as 6870 and Adobe after effects CS6 would start, but only one of the 2 monitors worked.
Same with Gibba and white screen with Bulrushes.

Now it identifies as 6870, works with dual monitor and after effects CS6 starts correctly. (using GraphicsEnabler=Yes, ATIconfig=Gibba and AtiPorts=4)

Going to test it further without GraphicsEnabler to see what happens

Thanks TH3L4UGH1NGM4N

[konjow]

Nice one

TH3L4UGH1NGM4N. Thank you

.
Any chance for similar solution for 10.8. to get my sapphire 6870 recognize like with this kext in 10.7?

[TH3L4UGH1NGM4N]

@konjow Thanks man, also here's the edited one for 10.8 final release

http://cl.ly/1s3h380s2q08

[konjow]

@TH3L4UGH1NGM4N Thank you Thank you.
I was no 10.6.8 for ages and decide to update to get mercury engine in Premiere working. I get 10.8 working and 2 day later 6870 arrived. I spend 12 hours to get this working on already instaled 10.8. Finally I got card recognise with your kext for 10.7 and two orgin one from 10.7:atiframebufer and atisupport. New one works itself. Great ...thanks again.

Sleep is not working I can life this but there are two issues which I dont know how to fix yet
first one I red same where in lion 10.7: DVD burner spins forever and display deas not go sleep
Rest looks great and Mercury works

[konjow]

Im stupid
Was using lower dvi port - so i got all of them working, which i dont need .
With top dvi orgin kext are good DvD works etc. without frame buffer change, GE-yes thats all

[TH3L4UGH1NGM4N]

Lulz we all make these little mistakes at times just happy you found a resolve for yours.

[shinokubo]

Hello!

I own a XFX Radeon HD6870 HD-687A-ZDFC, which is a non-reference card (the one with two fans), and I can't get it to work under ML 10.8 .

I have a fresh install, and AMDRadeonAccelerator.kext seems to be the problem.

My device ID's are in all ATI6000Controller.kext, ATIFrambuffer.kext, AMDRadeonAccelerator.kext and ATISupport.kext. I have to delete AMDRadeonAccelerator.kext, otherwise I get a white screen, GPU freeze after bootup. The Systems boots up properly, I can connect via Network and also readout the system.log:

kernel[0]: AMDBartsGraphicsAccelerator: ** Device in slot: SLOT--1 **
kernel[0]: ** GPU Debug Info Start **
.
.
.

If I boot without AMDRadeonAccelerator.kext, the desktop comes up, but of course no QE/CI.

Do I have to edit the AMDRadeonAccelerator binary found in the kext to adress the fact that it is not a reference card? If so, can anybody point in the right direction?

Thank you very much for any ideas you might have.

-shinokubo

[DocShadow]

TH3L4UGH1NGM4N, on 17 May 2012 - 01:35 AM, said:

Okay I can give you my modified 6000controller to try out assuming your port layout is 2x DVI - HDMI - 2x miniDP  (be sure to backup your existing one in the event this doesn't workout).  Install do the permission setting and what not, restart, and then at the boot prompt type AtiPorts=5 and AtiConfig=Gibba to load up the Gibba framebuffer which I modified for my 6870 to work.

http://cl.ly/3m210d0i3R3x2N1t0N1h

Thanks , this solution worked perfectly.  

I put the string info in the plist file.

Doc

[iPal]

Thank you so much for the 10.8 kext it's working great on my system.. both dvi ports working, cheers mate

[aikidoka25]

Friends,

I think this is the good place to ask about 6870 card.

I am currently using Sapphire 4870 (standard clock, using GraphicsEnabler, I think this is the product link) and I think it is quite noisy to my liking (found this by comparing the noise between the display card exhaust and the cpu exhaust).

Thinking of getting a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 6870 900MHZ 1GB 4.2GHZ HDMI 2xDVI DisplayPort PCI-E Video Card (Mft. Part #: 11179-09-20G)

Do you guys think this will solve the noise issue I have?

Here is the current card data from System Information
 Screen Shot 2012-09-04 at 11.54.21 PM.png   95.76K   141 downloads

The sensors information using the tools developed by Slice (I have fakesmc and all the related kexts from his projectosx), it is not under heavy load, no graphics heavy program was running when the screenshot was taken, only there was cpu spike, normally it is around 1596MHz.
 Screen Shot 2012-09-04 at 11.47.23 PM.png   168.5K   130 downloads

Cheers!