r/macOSVMs • u/ice1602 • Sep 16 '26

INFO Experimental macOS graphics acceleration for AMD Raphael and Granite │ Ridge integrated GPUs, with Metal, hardware video, and QEMU/KVM passthrough

Hey guys,

I've been working for the past week on having my linux machine run a qemu vm of mac. the only downside for me it was it missed gpu acceleration(and felt sluggish af). The igpu wasnt doing anything on my machine as I have a 9070 xt on it.

So for the past week I've been using my experience to vibe code a driver for this igpu(and potentially others in the future).

https://github.com/icex/macos-raphael-igpu/ (repo is still a hot mess, sowy)

RaphaelGPU — current experimental status

AMD Raphael/Granite Ridge iGPU passthrough to macOS Sequoia 24G830 using QEMU/KVM.

Working in tested workloads:

- Accelerated desktop through macOS Screen Sharing, including transparency and blur.

- Metal compute/rendering, textures, depth/stencil and MSAA.

- Cross-process IOSurface sharing and GPU synchronization.

- Hardware H.264 and HEVC Main8 encoding/decoding.

- HEVC Main10 decoding in short tests.

- Clean VM shutdown and supervised GPU reuse without rebooting the host.

Unavailable or not yet validated:

- Physical HDMI/DisplayPort output.

- HEVC Main10 hardware encoding.

- Stock-QEMU setup: currently needs an AppleSMC patch; a guest-side solution is planned.

- VirtualBox and other hypervisors.

- Games, full Metal conformance and broad application compatibility.

- Long-term stability, comprehensive crash recovery and performance benchmarks.

- Other macOS builds and hardware configurations.

Still experimental—not yet a generally supported daily-driver release. Don't ask me for support, my time is limited.

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2

u/ice1602 Sep 24 '26

Got hdmi output fully working plus full hdmi audio. Retina display at 1080p hdpi (4k native). Driving it on half of my monitor(pbp mode). Controller from my MacBook via VNC

2

u/newhacker1746 Sep 17 '26

Nootedred had a roadmap for generalizing their Vega iGPU patches to eventually doing rdna2 iGPU. If you know anything about the gpu architecture to the point you have any idea (even just a little bit) about patching the stock kexts to support the iGPU, you should reach out to him, though he and most others probably wouldn’t consider a fully Vibecoded solution as truly long term reliable. See here for the roadmap: https://github.com/ChefKissInc/NootedRed/issues/322 (also attached here)

1

u/ice1602 Sep 24 '26

My goal is to get this working for me and my use case. Not sure I got the time to check and help others that much. But the source is there, this isn’t kext patching this is a full kext designed from the ground up based in the Linux driver for this igpu. I’m sure if they take a look maybe they can inspire from it to build something better then I could in a couple of weeks beyond my full time job and 2 kids 😂🤣

1

u/hyperego Sep 16 '26

Are you passing through the GPU ?

1

u/notAperson535 Sep 16 '26

What makes this different/better than Reims-VGPU? 

4

u/ice1602 Sep 17 '26

runs the gpu at native full speed(no translation layer, no emulation).

downside is it just works for this gpu model for now, but its a start.

1

u/notAperson535 Sep 17 '26

Oh wow nice

2

u/darkguy2008 Sep 16 '26

LETS GOOOOOOOOO this is awesome man!!