Hmmm 4mx PCI? |
January, 15, 2003 1:33 PM |
mjoecups358 |
I was at best buy yesterday and I noticed they have a Geforce 4MX PCI card on the shelf there with 64M of ram for $99. Sheesh. and the crapolla radeon PCI 7000 is still over 100? I wonder what the possibility of creating a rom image from the AGP 4mx card might be? I realize this is kind of sketchy, but man, anything that would get us some faster video performance and free us from ATI would rock! Marty |
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RE: Hmmm 4mx PCI? |
January, 15, 2003 4:46 PM |
marcush |
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Chrisdold, It is true that the performance of the Radeon cards, particularly the original Radeon Mac Edition, is held back by the limitations of the oldworld architecture. Barefeats has graphs that show that the Radeon levels off at about 1024x768 on oldworld machines, indicating that it has plenty of headroom for increased performance. That being said, I don't think that makes them unworthwhile for our oldworld machines. For instance, I'm currently playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein on my Power Tower Pro w/Sonnet G4 800 and 1GB RAM. I am able to play the game at 1024x768 with all graphics settings set to high, with only one exception. Texture detail I have to leave at the default "Normal" setting. I can also enable Trilinear filtering and texture compression. I have effects such as ejecting brass and wall marks on too. The game hardly slows down. My other games ST Voyager: Elite Force, Alice, and Aliens vs Predator offer similar results. I got Medal of Honor at Macworld and it plays very well also with similar settings. I have seen it slow down in very large outdoor environments but I think that is something I can fix with settings tweaks. I would like to be able to use an Nvidia card and had looked into the possibility a few months back, visiting the same sites you mention and coming to the same conclusion. Powerderhaus, are you saying that you have QE enabled but have the UI reniced to run at high priority? I turned QE on again last night again to test it out with 10.2.3 but it seemed to me that performance had gone down somewhat with my Radeon compared to 10.2.2. Is "system optimize" the name of the utility you used? I'd like to try it out. One last observation. While I had QE enabled last night I started up Return to Castle Wolfenstein to see if it would still play and it did. it even seemed to run a little better. The only reason I turned it off in 10.2.2 was that it did cause problems for me doing video capture. The quality of the DV video suffered and had sound dropouts. |
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RE: Hmmm 4mx PCI? |
January, 15, 2003 4:14 PM |
chrisdold |
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There has been quite a bit of work done to flash PC GeForce Cards to work on the Mac. I have flashed a couple different GeForce 2MX AGP cards for use in G4 Towers and they have worked flawlessly. Some people claim to have had some success with PCI versions as well. There is a forum for Non-3Dfx video cards at http://www.xlr8yourmac.com. You can find information on results there. Also, there is a page that is dedicated to the flashing process and has results for many cards. It's a good place to start. The URL is http://www.cybercoment.com/macgeforce.htm. There are 3 problems with flashing a PC GeForce 4MX. First, the OEM Mac version of the GeForce 4MX is a kind of hybrid of the PC versions. I don't believe there is an exact 1 for 1 match like there is in the GeForce 2MX. This has ROM compatability issues. Second, the Mac Version of the GeForce 4MX has a different ROM chip than the PC version so the Mac ROM will not load onto it. I have heard whispers that soldering a new ROM chip on the card *might* fix it, but have not heard of anyone doing it. Third, even a flashed GeForce 2MX PCI will not work on an OldWorld machine because of the lack of support for the cards in Firmware. There were many problems with GeForce cards until Apple updated the Firmware of the NewWorld machines to support them. Once that was done, it became possible to flash the cards. The OldWorld ROMs do not have the support and therefore cannot use the flashed cards. I learned this the hard way. I have a PCI GeForce 2MX Twinview card I am selling on Ebay right now because I tried to flash it before reading the part about OldWorld machines not working. I have not tested more than this one card, and the twinview might be a source of the problem, but others have said that OldWorld machines can't support the cards. In summary, we are stuck with a very limited number of choices for PCI video for OldWorld machines. The original Radeon and Radeon 7000 are about the only current cards that are supported. I am also currently selling an ATI Nexus 128 PCI with 32Mb of RAM on Ebay (closes 1/16), which is another choice. I'm not trying to turn this into an ad for my auctions, but just thought I would let you know. However, the last few Nexus 128s I have seen go through Ebay have gone for just about as much as a Radeon 7000. The 7000 is a much better card, since it's at least based on the Radeon chip and not the Rage 128. I'm selling the Nexus to upgrade to a Radeon, if I can bring myself to do it. I have asked the question before in this forum and gotten the response that there are bottlenecks in OldWorld machines that really choke the Radeon cards, so the speed increase is not all that dramatic. |
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RE: Hmmm 4mx PCI? |
January, 15, 2003 3:37 PM |
powderhaus |
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I have a radeon and just found out that it realy can't handle Quartz extreme. so i took it off and i told system optimize that the UI was high priority, now it works great (for PCI.) |
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