I'm looking at possibly acquiring a Powermac FW800 that I believe has Radeon 9800 Pro but I'm not sure how well this card is/will be supported. My understanding is that only models 9000 to 9250 have 3D support and others have only 2D acceleration. Is this correct? Is support for later models such as 9800 coming soon?

Also, what's the maximum DRAM that MorphOS can make use of on a graphics card? Is 256MB overkill? I'm currently running Mac Mini connected to 1920x1200 LCD and never saw graphics memory usage past 55MB (out of 64MB that is available).

Don't count on R300 3D support in the upcoming release.

Quote:

Heh! Try selecting the entire contents of a directory containing a few hundred files, then hit 'info' - you'll soon run out of graphics memory. (Warning: This experiment may require a hard reset afterwards)

If the Powermac shown at Essen had a Radeon 9600 and the Powerbook used a Mobility 9700 GPU, then the 9600 and 9700 will probably be supported (and if you're supporting the 9700, then the 9500 is supported and the 9800 would only require a little more work). But until they announce it, 3D support is still questionable.
With the low price of 92XX cards, why not buy a 128MB 92XX and reflash it for use until the more powerful cards are supported? Or you can just wait to see what's supported under 2.6.

Note - Extremely clear statement below makes my statement irrelevant. Glad I've got a 9250 already waiting (even if its got twice the supported memory).

[ Edited by Jim on 2010/8/29 19:17 ]

MorphOS 2.6 won't include new 3D drivers, this has been said several times already. Radeon 9500Pro, 9600Pro/XT, 9700Pro and 9800Pro will be supported but will only provide limited acceleration support with the supplied Radeon driver, e.g. all the enhanced display alpha effects are not h/w accelerated and no general 3D support is enabled.

> Powermac FW800 that I believe has Radeon 9800 Pro

If it's still the graphics card it was originally sold with then it's more likely a Radeon 9700 Pro.

> what's the maximum DRAM that MorphOS can make use of on a graphics card?

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7261&forum=11&start=78

Yeah I have a Radeon 9800 which will work in my peg 2. But dont have it installed because of no 3d accel. So i have to stick with my Rad 9000 pro 2 for now :( I'd love to have full operation with my rad 9800 in morph (especially with wolfenstein coming) Not to mention the speed up with linux and mol...

Here's and equally silly idea. How about support for the ATI X800 AGP card for G4 and G5 Macs? They're not much more expensive than a 9800XT.

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The G5 X800 cards I have seen can't be used in a G4 AFAIK. It's neither about price nor silly ideas anyway, you need to find someone silly enough to do a driver for it :D

I've seen X800 and X850 based cards that were G4 compatible, but that's not why I called it a silly idea (although one I would desire).

The architecture of the X8XX series is a direct offshoot of the 9700/9800 series. It would make more sense to get 3D support in the 9500-9800 first.

Jim

Good point.. @ thread lets not hijack the thread to talk about X800 its about R300 radeon 3d support..

Jacek+Frank

Thanks for the honest answers.

Absolutely, which is why after getting a response (which I really didn't expect) I moved back on topic.

Besides I've hashed over this in a previous thread. There's only so much further we can go with Apple compatible AGP cards.

I'd be perfectly happy with an R300 3D driver (which we've now been told we're not getting with 2.6).

But, if not then, will we get it and when? (that is a purely rhetorical question as the developers have been very forthcoming already).

[ Edited by Jim on 2010/9/1 0:31 ]

[ Edited by Jim on 2010/9/1 0:45 ]

[ Edited by Jim on 2010/9/1 0:46 ]

I agree, acceleration is already re-engineered
look at http://r300.sourceforge.net
R300 means: 9600, 9700, 9800 and X800

R300 acceleration using this driver is painfully slow.

> look at http://r300.sourceforge.net

Actual site of this project would be http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Radeon

> R300 means: 9600, 9700, 9800

...and 9500, 9550, 9650, X300, X550, X600 and X1050.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Radeon_R300_series

> and X800

No, that's R400.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Radeon_R400_series

Korni

Thats because they dont have ubercoders like cyfm, kiero, and bigfoot :)

I'm glad you pointed of those Wiki listing, Andreas. They show the progression within each family pretty well.

As far as I know, most members of the R300 AGP family have an available Apple compatible BIOS.

I only brought up the R400 series because its architecture is very closely related to the R300, and now I see that mentioning it was an unnecessary distraction.

I'm sure we'll eventually see 3D acceleration for the R300 under MorphOS, but there's only some much the developers can handle.

This entire question is overshadowing the advances being made in the R200 drivers. Shader support? Fantastic!

I apologize (yet again) for going off topic, but I'd like to hear more about the improvements we will see in 2.6. Sounds like we'll see improvements in video performance (even without adopting later GPU families).

Well i'm guessing "2.6" will be powermac support and the release to follow that will have powerbook support. I would hazard a guess that for that version of morphos there will be 3d drivers for R300 due to onboard 9600+ chipsets on pb g4!

> onboard 9600+ chipsets on pb g4

To be more precice it's really only Radeon 9700 on the models that are supposed to be supported by MorphOS.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7298&forum=11#75689

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9700 w/ 8 pipelines and a slightly slower clock > 9600 w/ 4 pipelines.

I'm still not sure a driver could be created to cover virtually all R300 models (R300, Rv350, R350 etc.). Personally, I like an R360 (9800XT).

> 9700 w/ 8 pipelines and a slightly slower clock > 9600 w/ 4 pipelines.

I know. I was speaking about quantity ("9600+" means 9600 and 9700 at least), not quality :-)

I know you (and most of the other knowledgeable people on the forum) know this Andreas.
However, you're point on Powermac GPU brings us something to ponder. Will we get just R300 support or will we get Full support for the whole family?

Right now the highest model number card supporting 3D and 2D acceleration is the 9250. I wouldn't count on support for R300 cards (9700PRO, 9800) anytime soon.

Maximum GFX ram MorphOS can use is 128MB. If your card has more than that it probably will be ignored.

> Maximum GFX ram MorphOS can use is 128MB. If your card
> has more than that it probably will be ignored.

Actually, that depends on the kind of memory configuration on the card. According to pega-1, there're R300 based cards where MorphOS can use more than 128 MiB right now.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7339&forum=11&start=5

Anyway, I can't repeat it often enough ... Don't hold your breath for more 3D support in upcoming 2.6 release. It just adds PowerMac 3,x support and we try to get that as stable as possible before release ....