Driver in macOS Sierra refers to AMD Polaris 12 and 10 XT2 GPUs

References to new AMD Polaris GPUs have been found in macOS Sierra. One of the GPUs has the name Polaris 10 XT2, which could indicate the chip’s second generation. Also, the upcoming Vega 10 chip is mentioned in the code.

The references to Polaris 10 XT2 and Polaris 12 were discovered by a user of the tonymacx86 forum. The references can be seen by viewing the AMD9500Controller file with a hex editor.

AMD currently has video cards in its range with the Polaris 10-gpu, which are the RX 480 and RX 470. There is also a Polaris 11-gpu, which is a smaller chip that is used for the RX 460. AMD has previously indicated that the number of the Polaris GPUs means when development started, so 10 is the first chip, after that Polaris 11 was made and Polaris 12 can be both a faster and a slower chip.

Besides the presence of the GPU names in the drivers, there are no concrete indications about the arrival of new Polaris GPUs. It is not clear whether AMD will actually come up with new video cards equipped with the chips, or whether it concerns special GPUs for Apple computers.

However, an AMD video card with an unknown device ID recently surfaced in the benchmark section of the Ashes of the Singularity website. VideoCardz suggests that this may be a Vega video card, as the score matches that of a GTX 1080. The score does not appear to come from a card with two Polaris 10 GPUs, as the benchmark indicates a single GPU. is on the map.

Update 20.30: Changed GPU codename interpretation. Contrary to what was first mentioned, XT2 probably does not represent a dual GPU, but a new version of the chip.