Excuse me for my approximative English.

Is there any way to get a ATI HD4850 working on a 10.5.3 hackintosh ?

Thank you.

I'm working on it... I'll post info! I've *heard* that 10.5.2 includes info for the R770 chip in the kexts but I've yet to find anything.
EDIT- Device ID for 4850 is 0x9442

O..Thanks OMX-Knuckles

I thought 4850 do not work in 10.5.2 before I read this post
Now I will trade my 9600GT and buy HD4850 very soon
But,Do HD4850 have some problem working in 10.5.2?

It's not working yet, don't get your hopes up, guys I haven't put my card in my system yet! I'm not very good at mucking about with kexts, this may be a job for the pros. I'll see what I can do.

Any news ?

Not yet. I know very little about kext editing, but I'm learning... Slowly. Bottom line is, either the ATIRadeonX2000 kexts must support RV700 chips, or the RV700 must be similar enough to 3870/3850 to allow existing methods to work.

i think it's not about the kexts but mostly about the frameworks etc
maybe you should ask from someone that installed the beta snow leopard to test the card
or try to find the beta and test there
i think they included this hardware there

Good call. I may find the 10.6 beta tonight and try out the 4850.

waiting for your report

Me too, I've just successfully installed working Hackintosh using Retail DVD method. But my HD4850 is not supported yet. Need some gurus to help us here.

I've been too busy trying to figure out why 10.5.3 broke my audio to try the 4850. Sorry, guys. It may be a few days till I can test at all.

you'r da man...thanks in advance!

I'm asking around for the ATI kexts and frameworks from 10.6 in IRC channels as well as trying to get Snow Kitty for myself. If anyone has a copy or knows someone with a copy please please help out by getting the ATIRadeonX2000 kexts and OpenGL framework! Who knows if they'll be compatible at all with 10.5.3, but at least we'll know if there's hope for support in 10.6.

HD 4850 seems to have the best perfomance for the price. So why don´t you ask Netkas at irc.osx86.hu #radeonhd channel. Hope he will be happy to try to make it work, as he helped with HD 2xxx and HD 3xxx series. Powerplay does not work on HD3850 and HD3870 on OS X right now, so I guess you´ll have to change the stock cooler because the card seems to get too hot even at Windows, as it is rumored that Powerplay does not work with current drivers.

Hey OMX-Knuckles, did you have any luck with the Snow Leopard beta on this card? I have the ability to test it/work on getting it working but I'd like to know how your experiences went first

Im not sure as to the level at which the driver addresses the cards, however IIRC the 2900s had a signifcantly different design than the current cards. (They had a 512bit interface and a ring bus for examole IIRC). The 3870 cards *should* be a good starting point.

I should be getting my 4870 tomorrow, hopefully my 10.6 disc will arrive Thursday.

yea hope there will be drivers for this baby soon. But there is still the problem of this card being too hot in more ways than one. Apparently the fan is locked at 15-20%. there are a few ways to solve it in windows but I'm doubtful bout OSX. Sad guess I'll have to wait till there is more OSX support for the 4850

Temperatures are reported to decrease dramatically after replacing stock cooler on HD 4850.

.......Tempreatures are reported to decrease dramatically after using "fixes" on the stock cooler on HD 4850.

no need for AM coolers just hope newer models of the 4850 will address this issue cause I'm not sure if this issue can be address in OSX, "OR" you can get an AM Cooler.......=.=

I've asked around and examined the ATI frameworks/kexts and it doesn't look like the 4850 or 4870 will be supported anytime soon. It's different enough that 3850/3870 drivers won't work, and until Apple starts using the Radeon 4000-series cards in thier own systems there's little hope for a new driver.

well now that is terrible news....I'm planning to get it by the end of this week at S$230. I guess its back to XP...=.=

just for reference is the 9800GTX+ in the same boat as the 4850?

9800GTX+ is just a die shrink thanks to a different manufacturing process. But with diff clocks, nothing else AFAIK has been changed so current 9800 methods should still work.

Knockles, I thought there were R770 kexts included in OSX since 10.5.2 ?
Anyway, I've never understood correctly how the framework thing worked...
I thought the most important were those R770 drivers included in 10.5.2.

@experience hackintosh users, just wanted to now from your experience how long normally does it take for apple to have support for newer cards? Cause I really think its a matter of time b4 support are implemented for the 4800s but how long is the issue.
Cause I'm buying this card to game the last 2 months of freedom that I have, after that I pretty much don't have time to touch the pc for anything but emails and research. And sadly the 9800gtx+ is still not available and I'm guessing will be 30-40 more expensive...=.=

Apparently there's references to R770 somewhere in the kexts, but I can't see anything clear that indicates that they would work. So far I haven't been able to do the obvious and stick the card in the system because I've been really busy. If someone has a 4850 and time, try sticking your device ID in the ATIRadeonX2000.kext and see what happens.

ok I'll be the guinea pig. selling my 7600gt today and getting the 4850 tmr. I'll post what ever result...lets hope for the best!

how does this beast work??? Was about to get 8800gts 512 but this is a bit better

noob question guys: if i have a 4870, will i be still able to install osx in the pc? i mean, i know the OS won't recognise the card as a 4870, but will it at least have some basic recognition of it so i can use the OS?

thanks!

Has somebody already tried what happens when he uses the 4870 or 4850?

I´m very interested what happens then and if he can boot at all

I'm on 10.4.10 w/a 4850 and it works fine
just no acceleration etc.....

without drivers the card runs in vesa mode - no acceleration, dualscreen and resolution only changeable via commandline. otherwise it should work.

Anyone tried it yet?

Dunno what happened to my .6 disc but it hasn't turned up yet

I will try this though I'm a bit of a noob with kext editing.

I have a 4870, but the only difference between a 4850, and 4870 is the type of ram. The cores are identical so give me a second I'll grab that ID, boot to windows... modify the kext and load it up and see how I go

I tried adding 0x9440 which apparently is the ID for the HD4870 but got nothing when I installed the kext

Thanks for checking that out, bobbobson. R770 is different enough from R600 that there's not much hope of existing drivers working

I tried both the HD4850, and 4870 ID's and it ignored both and booted straight up using the VESA drivers

From what I have read, the references out there with regards to HD4xxx support reffer to an ATi developer kit. So it may be a case that there are/were drivers out there, but that they'd be specific to the ATi dev kit in question.

The other chance is if someone tries this on snow leopard or grabs a later kext possibly from snow leopard?

I'm only running 10.5.3 here so we can say the HD4xxx does not work with 10.5.x currently but it might work with 10.6 as I've heard that these development drivers were possibly added to 10.6

This is all hear say but if anyone wants to check out snow leopard it would be much appreciated.

Oh by the way Snow Kitty can now be sourced through the usual path way just tell them Uncle Torrence sent you

Just bought my 4850 two hours ago.

I was previously using Nvidia 7600GS. Rebooted into my PC and it works, but only detect the plain VGA with no multi-resolution, no CI/QE etc. The resolution is only 1024 x 768, but hey, at least it didn't give me a blank screen.

I'm typing this in the OSX firefox.

Got to go, time to play games instead of cracking my head over hackintosh.

PS: My MAC OSX is 10.5.3

can we fill out some "apple-please-support-this-hardware" - Form?
i want to buy myself an ATI 4870 too next week. Temperature wouldnt be a problem because I am cooling with water ^^

maybe its best we all fill out this:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

and request a driver for ati's 4850 and 4870 graphic cards.

The temperature is actually not a problem. All you do in windows is set the fan speed to 35% manually (or higher if you can handle the noise)through the catalyst control centre

I doubt there will be any useful way of petitioning Apple to release drivers for OS X for these cards, Apple puts all it's drivers through development. It could be up to 6 months before we see any official HD4xxx series drivers from Apple.

The references to the kexts in 10.5.2 are from a development kit sent to ATi, there is talk that there is driver support in the current 10.6 beta although I haven't gotten my hands on a copy of it yet.

The current method of getting these cards to work does not work... that said these cards work just fine without hardware support, and if you have a fast CPU you won't notice the difference unless you do a lot of 3D intensive work.

All said I don't see OS X as a gaming platform so for me at the moment it works fine as a desktop

Price notwithstanding, I suspect the 9800GTX+ is a better bet, re drivers. We shall see.

okay..i've about had it with this card..lol.

FINALLY installed Leopard..and HEY!..your graphic card isn't supported...

and the sad part is...i don't know how to change resolution either...

can anyone please refer me to a tutorial so that i can change resolution?

thanks.

Temperatures have been decent with my 4870. ATI cards normally run hotter compared to Nvidia cards.

But right now, I hardly doubt there will be and support for the R700 core, as there are no real drivers for the 48xx series on Windows right now. Driver support with ATI can be slow sometimes...But, it does make up for it.

if you simply switch out your stock cooler for a Duorb, the temps drop to about 40 degrees celsius.

worth it if you have the 50 bucks to spend on the cooler and you like to oc.

Please, if someone has a working ATI 4850 driver for OS X, please post and let us know.

Finally got to test it out and partitioned my HD to install with Kalyway. Would rather do a vanilla install with boot-132 (kalyway is missing a lot of small stuff, e.g. Alex from speech to text!), but a new hard drive can wait (don't want to reformat my data) until a driver comes for 4850.

It would be great if I could also get resolutions above 1024x768; I don't really care that much about graphics acceleration (thats why i have windows for games on the other partition); thanks.

I have the same problem. I just OS X installed and now I am stuck at a pretty awful resolution. How would I go about getting it to display at 1680x1050?

well, after doing a little research, i figured out how =]

all you do is when OS X is booting up, it will ask you if you want to boot normally or not.

press F8 and type in the following:

?video

then look through to see if 1680x1050 is there and if it is...

type this in:

"Graphics Mode"="1680x1050x32"

if it's not, look for something that's close to that resolution and just replace it.

so if you can't find 1680x1050, but 1600x1200 is there...type in this:

"Graphics Mode"="1600x1200x32"

btw, the 32 is the depth, like in windows there is which bit you want to put it as..this is that.

good luck =D

Yeah, THE BEST. Go ahead. Be the first.

P.S. Nothing personally.

Hm, I don't have a 1680x1050 option, however, i did type that in. I guess Mac OS loads the most optimal resolution and I got 1400x1050.

Thank you solidus636. After much trial and error I have concluded that the generic display drivers used (since the 4850 is not supported) do not support any image size larger than the default. I even tried using switchresx - nada.

I hope someday this card is supported as that is all that is keeping me from a fantastic OS X experience.

any news, im still looking to get one of these!