I have MOS up and running on a 17" 1.67 GHz PB and it's great (track pad is a bit wonky though).

Was reading up on Power Mac G5 support and was wondering what Hardware Overlay meant for GPU support?

I was going to buy a X1950 Pro but what would be the newest supported GPU for acceleration? Does MOS run well with just 2D acceleration? I don't think I need 3D acceleration right now, and after some reading newer GPU's might get 3D soon?

My plan was to have MOS just be a nice looking host for UAE/WHDLoad stuff and light Ambient stuff.

Anyways, thanks for any help.

Hardware overlay is usually a feature where you can define a rectangle. e.g 1024x768 and define a screen size and position. Now you can stream a game or video feed into the 1024x768
buffer and the gpu will auto position and auto scale the source material into the destination buffer. There is more to it, but this is the main feature.

This is usually combined with a window. MPlayer is using this feature. The advantage is that you just need to decode the video stream natively into the buffer and the graphics card does the rest.

More modern cards lack this feature as they are so powerful, so they can decode and scale the streams on the fly anyway. And the overlay feature got removed.

Do not hold you breath on specific graphic card or 3D support.

For UAE/WHDLoad even the smallest Radeon will work, so for a G5 just get one that works right now and done.

As Geit said, almost any supported card will work fine for light duty general use. I find 128MB is plenty of ram for general use.

If you are looking at the 1950Pro, you then own a late model PCIE G5 correct?.

Just note that while the 1950Pro PCIE will run MorphOS, you will not see the OpenFirmware (boot) menu, nor will it display OSX if you ever wish to dual boot. The factory Mac "flashed" G5 X1900 cards are pretty rare. You can "mac" flash the bios chip only on X1900XT or X1950XT but it is a laborious task. The card will then be able to dual boot MorphOS and OSX on a PCIE G5 showing at least 128MB. You can flash cards in an old PC desktop or on the bench with a cheap CH341A (green) EEPROM programmer and a chip clip.

I really value the OF boot screen so I personally would forget about card specs and have fun with what works at the moment. Then focus on finding or flashing a mac compatible card when possible.

That is my $.02

I have some hardware flashers laying around, and am no stranger to flashing PC cards to Mac.

I don't plan on using OSX on this and If I ever need to use OF I can just throw my Quadro FX 4500 back in for a bit.

I went ahead and got a X1950 Pro for pretty cheap. (would be nice to use on Mirari if I'll ever be able to get my hands on one lol).

My A2000/A1200 look a little lonely now.

Thanks guys!

[ Edited by ifrit05 01.07.2026 - 06:26 ]

Nice choice for MorphOS hardware.

I use a Single processor dualcore system, updated to the 2.5GHz cpu. Daily driven for 3 years and bullet proof, and overkill for most needs... :)

A few words of advice and comments to help:

1. You can put an NVIDIA PPC card in the lowest slot and the 1950 in the third slot. This will provide OF support and boot just fine into MorphOS.
2. Please note it will boot with just the 1950 right to MorphOS, you will have to set the PM to boot first from the CD.
3. I have seen certain configurations not boot consistently to MorphOS, requiring rebooting to get it hooked up, with just a PC based 1950 card. You might be able to flash it and be good to go.
4. It might also work best with using a sandisk ssd or hdd to boot from, you can use a real fast ssd as a secondary drive that houses all the data.
5. I realize you bought a card already, but there is a list somewhere for what cards work and what ones don't.
6. With your use case, likely not an issue, but if you drive 2 monitors with lots of stuff going on for serious productivity. A 256MB VMEM video card will be best, as it never will swap out if you run out of vmem (creating a slow moment for the swap).

The 1950 is the best option for 3d currently, 2d is just fine as well.

Good luck.

> A 256MB VMEM video card [...] never will swap out if you run out of vmem

What will such card do instead when running out of VMEM?

Quote:

My PPC Bios card has only 128mb VMEM that MorphOS sees.

When it runs out of vmem the OS stalls, so the mouse freezes for 3 seconds or so. Then work as normal. For me it could happen a few times per day. Never ran out with 256mb.

You can use the meter on the system bar to see how much you have.

>>> A 256MB VMEM video card [...] never will swap out if you run out of vmem

>> What will such card do instead when running out of VMEM?

> My PPC Bios card has only 128mb VMEM that MorphOS sees. When
> it runs out of vmem the OS stalls [...]. Never ran out with 256mb.

My question was what -- if not swapping out -- a 256 MiB card will do instead if it runs out of VMEM, because that's what you wrote. Or did you mean to say that a 256 MiB card never will swap out because it won't run out of VMEM (which is something else)?