Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 2:43 AM |
mjoecups358 |
JoeVT has made an amazing effort using various mac ROMs and rom tweakers(he ported one from an open source PC project), and has produced a modified ROM for Radeon 9000 PCI cards. I have used a PC to flash my powercolor 9000 PCI (64M) card, AND IT WORKS! There is no video from the startup chime till the blue screen (sound familiar?), but after that it works like a champ. OpenGL acceleration is obvious from furry and from Q3 which can now run at 1280*1024 on my G3/275, and is much smoother then my Original radeon EVER was. DVD playback works too. Incredible! So, there is a new high(er) end video card to play with for us... Joe has some kind of Hercules (9000 PCI) card working also, and is thinking about others... Also the ATI smartshader demo's now run on my old PTP, which is pretty incredible IMO. Marty |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 11, 2003 7:52 PM |
lyonsdj88 |
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Regardless of your cpu,if you have a Radeon 7000 or 7200 to compair with, you should see a marked improvement in UT2K3 with R9000. Sorry, no G4 800 here, got a AMD Socket A 800mhz.:-p |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 11, 2003 3:57 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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My CPU is too slow to run UT2K effectively (G3/275)... Send me a G4/800 and I'll be HAPPY to run some benchmarks for you... Marty |
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Whom do I have to bribe? |
October, 11, 2003 3:32 PM |
lyonsdj88 |
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So, fellows what would it take for me to bribe(trade) you out of some UT2K3 benchmarks. I've got lots of Mac stuff around taking up space. Some pc stuff too, don't tell anyone. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 09, 2003 12:40 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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Chibi, I used to bug Mike at XLR8yourmac all the time to let me in to the forums over there, but they were locked down? Are they available for new members now? I will go look. Personally I would prefer to use some other forum TO THIS ONE, although I am excited and hopefull that OWC will EVENTUALLY make good on there promise to update the forum here. You should feel free to share any info you glean here over there as far as I am concerned, I think JoeVT is still working on perfecting/broadening his tools and supported cards. Marty PS I Got your name right!!!! So sorry about that! |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 08, 2003 12:01 AM |
lyonsdj88 |
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mjoecups, I never saw any + or - to running QE on a pci radeon ,so I too leave it off. But just wondered what it would do on that RV250 chip. I never bought in to that hole bus bandwith thing. Once I ran QE on my NVIDIA 32mb GF2 MX 200 PCI card and it was sooooo slow. The Dock was stuck. The NVIDIA card was 85% as fast as a R7000 pci in Q3 and UT2K3,but PCI QE was bad on that card. Looking ahead to 10.3+ QE is going to be a "Requirement" rather than a "neat trick" like it is now. BTW thanks for taking the time to answer my endless qustions, tho I didn't post here much in the past I have been reading here for well over a year. I've been working on a PCI NVIDIA card for Old world for about 1 1/2 years. I want faster video for pci+it's fun and I have nothing else to do. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 07, 2003 11:39 PM |
chibi_delenn |
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mjoecups/joevt, There has been a lot of fervor in the XLR8 forums regarding this particular endeavor seen in this thread, but none of the members there have access to this board. They wanted me to ask if you would allow this information to be shared in that forum too. If not, I understand, as it is *your* work, not mine. If you would be willing, that would be great. If you want things worded a certain way, perhaps what you could do is email me your version of the information as you wish it to be told, and I can paste that in verbatim over at the XLR8 forums (assuming neither of you are members there). My email is chibi_delenn at mac doht com. Either way, I will abide by what you decide. - Chibi Delennâ„¢ |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 07, 2003 1:58 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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I decided that playing with QE on PCI macs is a waste of time, a long time ago... So, that venture is going to be left to someone else. I will do some Q3 benchmarks today hopefully. Marty |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 07, 2003 12:36 AM |
lyonsdj88 |
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mjoecups358 joeVT, have you tryed the Hack for QE on the R9000 yet? If so how did it work. Any Green spots in DVD playback? Sure like to see some hard real world BenchMarks on that card vs R7000 and R7200 so if you fellows get time:-) If the Bench's showed much better speeds with the R9000 maybe some one could put pressure on ATI to put out a Better PCI video card for the MAC. Just think what a R9200 could do in the 66mzh slot of a B&W with a 1ghz G4. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 06, 2003 5:50 PM |
tbenninghoff |
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I have access to a G4 with the OEM 9000 AGP - is this the ROM to start with? And how did you save the ROM - by switching it to a PC and using those tools? I'm not alone i'm sure in wishing for a better PCI card than the 7000, so please give us a few more details - or just point us in the right direction. I have a 8600 with the 800 MHz G4 and I would love to try a 9000 PCI in it. impressive accomplishment. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 05, 2003 9:58 PM |
joevt |
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There's no way to tell if it will work until you try it. The 9200 might work with a modified Mac Radeon 9000 rom but you need the card's PC BIOS to figure out how the Mac firmware needs to be modified. I don't know yet if a 128 MB version will work. There's another thread here that tells how to get a Mac Flasher. The PC flasher can be found on the web (the one for the 9800 is the latest). |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 05, 2003 7:40 PM |
esmith |
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CompUSA has these two video cards in PCI format Xtasy 9200 SE powered by ATI’s Radeon™ 9200 SE VPU with 128MB or 64MB DDR memory. I would be happy to test these... Should they work? Also... Where is the Flash utility? Preferably a Mac executable although I have a PC. Where is the Radeon 9000 Rom? |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 02, 2003 12:56 AM |
lyonsdj88 |
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The advantage of higher end cards like the Radeon 9000 over the Radeon 7000 (especially on slower CPUs) is the ability to do higher resolutions at similar frame rates. The Radeon 7000 can't do 1920x1440 like the Radeon 9000 can. This is also true for a game like Q3 ,but games like UT2K3 call on the more advanced feture set of the R2xx/RV. In Q3 I see the same frame rates (- maybe 1-2 FPS) from 640x480 all the way up to 1900x range. As high as my monitor will go. Can't remember doing High rez tests in UT2K3, I'll do some and report back.The UT2K3 test on the Radeon 8500 was at 800x600@120mhz and the Radeon 7000 was also the same. I've tested this over and over and I'm very sure. I got it stright from a developer for the Mac team at ATI that the reason they don't/won't make a better card for the PCI bus is that the Bandwith is to low for the better cards to work. I don't think that is true. I'd love to see some UT2K3 scores from that R9000. I used the demo ver. so if like me you don't own the game you can use the demo. Let me know if you'd like to know how to run the time demo, if you don't know. NOTE my FPS score's are limited by my CPU as I can't hit the fill rate of many 3D cards with 400Mhz G4 or 450mhz G3. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 01, 2003 1:37 PM |
joevt |
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lyonsdj88, What screen resolution is used for those benchmarks? The advantage of higher end cards like the Radeon 9000 over the Radeon 7000 (especially on slower CPUs) is the ability to do higher resolutions at similar frame rates. The Radeon 7000 can't do 1920x1440 like the Radeon 9000 can. Note: The 7200 is R100. The 7000 is RV100. The 9000 is RV250. Here's a list of Radeons: http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/ATIRadeon |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 01, 2003 11:29 AM |
jseibyl |
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typo ......9000..... |
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RE: Radeon 9000 mjoecups358 |
October, 01, 2003 11:20 AM |
jseibyl |
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Thanks for the site, I don't have a PC 9800 (mine is 7000 64 meg), but if I DO get one..... :-) Jim |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
October, 01, 2003 11:10 AM |
lyonsdj88 |
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BTW, the game to benchmark is UT2k3 as it can take advantage of the 9000(R250) chip and Q3 can't. Q3&JK2 are no faster for me R7000(R100)pci vs. R8500(R200)AGP in a powermac G4(AGP) 400. here are some score's from the same two cards in the same mac. Q3 44.5FPS R7000: 44.5FPS R8500.UT2003 Build UT2003_Build_[2003- 02-16_18.56] MacOS 10.2.6 PowerPC G4 @ 400 MHz ATI Radeon 7000 OpenGL Engine dm-asbestos?game=engine.gameinfo exec=../Benchmark/Stuff/flybyexec.txt - benchmark -seconds=71 -nosound 6.725564 / 17.745220 / 146.950180 fps rand[681145016] Score = 17.753296 UT2003 Build UT2003_Build_[2003-02-16_18.56] MacOS 10.2.8 PowerPC G4 @ 400 MHz ATI Radeon 8500 OpenGL Engine dm-asbestos?game=engine.gameinfo exec=../Benchmark/Stuff/flybyexec.txt - benchmark -seconds=71 -nosound 8.671699 / 40.847931 / 136.964966 fps rand[681145016] Score = 40.654091 |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 6:44 PM |
joevt |
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The people who were flashing 9100's were doing the AGP version weren't they? If I can get the PCI 128 MB to work then it might be possible to get the AGP version to work but I'm not really interested in doing that since ATI makes a perfectly good AGP card for the Mac called the 9800 Pro. However, if there was a possibility of getting component video out on any of the PC cards to work in a Mac then that's another story. But I don't have an AGP Mac or a component video TV and new TV's have DVI-D don't they? |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 5:41 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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Joe is right about resetting the output device of course... I get the nice grey screen and Apple logo now. I personally don't care about OS9 support for 3d stuff... It will be interesting to see how well this does with more CPU. My G3/275 isn't exactly hard core. But Quake III is incredible, really. Xbench does not show any advantage (actually a slight disadvantage), but I wonder if this is an xbench issue with my SLOW cpu. I am going to defer to Joe on the ROM distribution issue, although I will put the PC flasher on my idisk, Joe will probably have a slicker Mac flasher (I think he does already). The PC based flash process is the same as the 7000, although a different flash program was needed to recognize my powercolor (evil commando). My idisk is http://homepage.mac.com/mjoecups the file is called 9800modflashrom Anyhow, if joe is ok with it, I am game for putting up the powercolor radeon 9000 PCI rom also... Marty |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 3:01 PM |
marcush |
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I just bought a Powercolor Radeon 9000 PCI on ebay for $70. They too seem to be out of the retail channels in the US. One site I looked at said that they were discontinued and no longer available. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 2:33 PM |
esmith |
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What is the Download link? |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 2:10 PM |
marcush |
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That's what I'd read about the 9100. However, I've also read that the 128MB cards are problematic. The report from Macbidouille.com a month ago said that the person who flashed a Powercolor 9100 had a 64MB card and that an attempt with a 128MB card had failed. I searched around trying to get a Powercolor 9100 but they are no longer in the retail chain. The closest I could get was a Visiontek 9100 which did not work in the end. I'll take what I can get now and a Radeon 9000 would be great so if you don't mind I would love to get a copy of your flashing tools. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 1:56 PM |
joevt |
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The 9000 does show at boot in OS X. You just have to set the output device in XPostFacto just like for the Radeon 7000. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 1:53 PM |
joevt |
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marcush, The 9100 is more like a Radeon 8500 based card. You'll need a different firmware for that. I believe 8500's are faster than 9000's because they have twice as many texture units. There are Radeon 9200 PCI cards but I couldn't find any clock speed specs for those. The 9200 is based on the 9000 so it is probably also slower than a 9100. The Hercules 9000 is clocked at 250/200 (CPU/Memory). The PowerColor is slightly slower at 250/190. The 9100 (from VisionTek) is 250/250. That plus a 128 MB option and twice as many texture units per pipeline make it a much better card but it doesn't have S-Video Out and the DVI connector doesn't do analog. I'll be trying the 9100 next. |
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RE: Radeon 9000 PCI |
September, 30, 2003 1:51 PM |
ian |
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The one reason I like the 7000 is that it initializes right at boot, so if there are problems I can boot the machine in verbose mode and watch what is going on. That's one of the reasons I got rid of the Matrox video card I was using in favor of a flashed 7000. I don't often have problems at boot, but I like to see what the heck is going on. It doesn't look like the 9000 will let you do it, so I probably won't be going down that route. |