Dear all, please help me and don't flame me immediately
because I've already read all the topics here about
multiple gfx cards (It took me some hours... argh! ;)

What I need is putting THREE gfx boards on my PegII.
One should be the main one on AGP, i.e where desktop and
programs mainly run. Plus two identical PCI ones.

The main AGP card must be very fast and have crispy
image in 2d, at least like my actual Radeon 7000 Sapphire
(3d acceleration not strictly required but no bad if
present). The two identical PCI boards are to be used
as framebuffers, so a decent image quality is needed
even without particular speed performances.

Unfortunately I've well understood that we poor mortals
with MOS 1.4.5 cannot mout any additional gfx card
if the AGP one is a Radeon, so what one ? I heard that
the other supported cards (aminly Voodoo) don't excel
in 2d quality. Also I read that radeons PCI don't
seem to work properly. So I should end up with three
ugly Voodoos ?

Any suggestion about which cards to use in this combo
and any related hints is welcome. Thanks!

Elena

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It has nothing to do with MorphOS, this is yet another bug in the OFW (it doesn't init the cards properly)...

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They should work, provided they are inited by the OFW.


- CISC

Hmm.. this is 2 days straight now i've had this conversation :)

CISC of course is right, its an OF prob of how the init of the boards goes.

I have personally had a dual gfx card setup on peg1 and peg2 using Vodoo as AGP and Radeon 9000 pci. Worked great, whats really cool is with Pro Station Audio you can have the mixer on 1 screen and the sequencer on the other! Surprised that worked. Radeon 7k pci cards should work as well though i had one here that did not.

Also CDFR has atm this setup.

I'm curious to know about how SIS cards get recognized by OF and dont know if anyone has tried multiple cards with the AGP being a SIS *If anybody would know it would be Bigfoot since he loves SIS cards so much

magnetic

>I have personally had a dual gfx card setup on peg1 and
>peg2 using Vodoo as AGP and Radeon 9000 pci.

Which model is exactly your Voodoo AGP card ?
Is it so poor in quality vs. a Radeon, in your
opinion ?

Also, I didn't understand well if double head is
definitely not supported by 1.4.5 and/or firmware

And, is a PCI gfx card noticeably slower than an
AGP one for normal 2d usage ?

I've used Voodoo3 2000 and 3000, Radeon 7000, two 7500s and 9200SE on Peg1's AGP and I can't say any big difference in image quality, but I'm not graphic artist or anything ;) I think Voodoo's are still nice and good quality cards even if they're bit old. Only thing that they only support 16bit in 3D, but that isn't big thing IMHO. Maybe there's also differences what resolutions you can get from them, but I haven't tweaked that much ;)

And at least in Peg1, Voodoo3 is faster than slowest Radeons in 2D use. If you can trust to p96speed results at all, then Voodoo3 beats Radeon 7000 in all areas. When comparing to faster Radeons, Voodoo loses in some areas clearly, but then it still beats all Radeons in couple of tests.

>I've used Voodoo3 2000 and 3000, Radeon 7000, two 7500s
>and 9200SE on Peg1's AGP and I can't say any big
>difference in image quality, but I'm not graphic artist
>or anything ;)

I mean a good 1280x1024 on 21" monitor. My Radeon
7000 is near perfection, but I heard many people
complaining about poor voodoo quality.

It's a pity that we cannot use any combination
of gfx boards as we like :(

Although I never used two grafix cards at the same time, my Voodoo 5500 had better color than my current Radeon 7500... as for 2D capability... I find little difference for day to day jobs between the two cards... For 3d the Radeon seems faster, but I haven't done any real comparisons

I have 3 GFX cards in my Pegasos.

A PCI Radeon 9000
An AGP Voodoo 5 5500
A PCI Vooddo 3 3000

All 3 cards work fine at the same time. I used to have some problem with 3D when a game would open on the wrong gfx card but it was possible to promote it back on the right one. Maybe this has been corrected since.

The display quality is the best on the radeon and the worse on the V5500.

Quote:

I have 3 GFX cards in my Pegasos.

A PCI Radeon 9000
An AGP Voodoo 5 5500
A PCI Vooddo 3 3000

All 3 cards work fine at the same time. I used to have some problem with 3D when a game would open on the wrong gfx card but it was possible to promote it back on the right one. Maybe this has been corrected since.
The display quality is the best on the radeon and the worse on the V5500.


Well. Do you think a Radeon 9000 PCI is noticeably
slower than an AGP one ?
Also: could I use identical TWO Radeon 9000 PCI
in addition to a voodoo AGP ?

Thanks

Hey Christophe

That 9000 is a good card for sure BTW I had dual display working with Debian with it - Dual Shared I should say!

Hi Elena

For 2 D operations you would not have a noticable difference with Radeon 9000 AGP and PCI. e.g I have a Radeon 9100 128mb AGP card and with MOS its just as fast on 2d as the Radeon 9k pci imho. So not "noticable"
Oh, and Dual head does work with MOS but its just a mirrored display obviously. With linux you can have a shared display and I have to say that is the way to roll

magnetic


[ Edited by magnetic on 2006/3/25 18:28 ]

Can't add much to cdfr's experience regarding usage of multiple cards,
but regarding image quality: unfortunately this seems to vary also
between different cards of the same make.

I have tried three cards in my pegs: Radeon7000, Voodoo3, and
Radeon9250. Out of these, the Radeon7k has much, much poorer image
quality than the other two, there's no comparison. But I know that
other people with Radeon7k don't have such bad image quality, so it
seems it depends on good/bad luck, too.

I have a Voodoo PCI too, but I haven't tested with dual cards yet, I'm
a bit too happy with the Radeon9250 that I'd rather not go back to the
Voodoo 3 as main card. But I figure MUI apps should handle
multimonitor usage fairly well.

Btw, we're speaking of Voodoo and Radeon PCI. I had
a look at local computer retailers and looks like
they've no PCI gfx cards, only PCI-express (I figure
out they neither fit nor work in our PCI connectors,
do they ?)
Also 3dfx-based cards (voodoo) seems quite obsolete and
hard to find...

&

Ebay is your best friend here!

Hi Elena,

I tried a Radeon 9250 PCI a while ago. It worked with MorphOS. However I did not try very long time, so cant say right now which software works, or not, or how it compares in reflect with other graphicscard. I only looked for that MorphOS booted up properly with it, and it did.

Thanks for all evidences.
What's sure is I'll have to search in the
second-hand market !

Btw, are there any plans for a Pegasos firmware
update to fix that radeon initialization issues ?

Just to clarify, here's how it works:

The Radeon 2D driver in MorphOS requires the gfxcard to have been initialised by the firmware before being handed over to MorphOS.

The firmware on the Pegasos only initialises the first graphics card it finds, and it scans PCI before it scans AGP.

Other drivers do not have this limitation.

This in practice means that if you want more than 1 graphics card, you can only have one Radeon, and it must be PCI. What you do about the other cards is up to you.

However, at least if you're using a Pegasos 1, be aware of which PCI Radeon you get, at least keep the option open to return it, as I've heard of people having problems with the Pegasos 1 correctly intialising PCI Radeons. I'm not sure if the Pegasos 2's firmware still suffers from this problem or not.

About the Voodoo display quality:

Voodoo 3 has the best display Quality, followed by the Voodoo 5 and then the Voodoo 4.

The bad quality on the V4 and V5 is especially noticable on LCD monitors, where you in some screen modes literally can see the lines on the screen wobble. The V3 looks fine AFAIR.

For Radeon dispaly quality, in my experience it mostly boils down to some Radeon models having the VGA connector connected to the PCB with an unshielded ribbon cable. Even "shielding" this with some tinfoil helped dramatically. So either get a card where the VGA connector is on the PCB, or use DVI :)

Finding an usable PCI Radeon is very easy :
http://www.rue-montgallet.com/prix/75012/acheter/18943/Gecube-Radeon-9250-128Mo-PCI/
http://www.rue-montgallet.com/prix/75012/acheter/15960/HIS-Excalibur-Radeon-9200-128Mo-PCI/
http://www.rue-montgallet.com/prix/75012/acheter/19277/HIS-Excalibur-Radeon-9200SE-128Mo-PCI/

I noticed such cards are also available in most german shops.

I am sure you can find one in Italy too.


[ Edited by Henes on 2006/3/28 16:18 ]

@ Henes

Thanks for the links, I'll have a look!

@ Bigfoot

Yeah those facts were clear (thanks for explaining
that again of course), in fact I wonder if this strange
OF behavior could be fixed sooner or later.
Why OF must initialize ONLY the first card it finds ?
Are any people working to fix that AFAYK ?

&

Quote:

Well, there are a few possible explanations, but the most likely is that this problem has simply not been given any priority so far.

There could also be some problems with the way Smart Firmware works which makes it difficult, but that would be pure speculation :)

Quote:

Well, yes, as far as I know, there are people working on the firmware, but I have no insider knowledge on the firmware or Bplan, so I could easily be wrong ;)

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Well, there are a few possible explanations, but the most likely is that this problem has simply not been given any priority so far.

So I think even drivers for other gfx cards (matrox,
geforce,...) are low priority :(
I know that's an old topic but it's sad the we have
the choice only (almost...) between Radeons and
VooDoos...

Quote:

For MorphOS, it's definitely a low priority.

Writing a good, well working driver unfortunately does take time, especially if you want 3D support.

Furthermore, the Radeons is what there is best documentation for of currently produced and developed cards. Even if that documentation is little to none, it's still better than the absolute nada there is for the NVidia cards.

About Matrox, for the largest part of users, a Matrox card would be a downgrade, and to the best of my knowledge, they're not producing any new end user cards. Besides that, as stated before, there are simply too many other things with higher priority to spend time on than that.

IMO it's better to have one well-supported series of graphicscard than to have half-assed support for 4 different cards, and that's pretty much what the choice is between ATM :/

A good new or what ?

Yesterday an Italian user told me he managed to install
both a Radeon 8500 AGP and a voodoo 5 5500 PCI on his
Pegasos and they work without any problem!
He bought his Peg2 from Vesalia quite recently and his
firmware is 1.2 20050808153840, while mine is older
1.2 20040810112413 ! So perhaps Bplan really fixed
something about radeons initialization in the meanwhile ?

I cannot see that with my eyes because he lives too far,
but there's no reason he could lie. So I ask: perhaps
I can ask an OF update to some BPlan ppl ? And why
Bplan doesn't release updates to the users ?

Quote:

Could sound like it. Well, more likely, they probably just scan AGP first. You could ask him if both graphics cards are initialised by OF, or only the AGP one.

My firmware is about the same date as yours (IIRC), but my Pegasos is a bit out of reach ATM, so can't tell you exactly. Maybe Henes will be as nice as to power it on and tell me the version of my OF? ;)

Quote:

Doesn't hurt to ask

Quote:

Well, I can't speak for bplan, but a good guess could be that releasing a new firmware which works on all board revisions, and in general not introduces more new problems than it fixes, probably takes quite a bit of testing and quality assurance. Who'd want to release a firmware which kills maybe 5% of the boards out there? I certainly wouldn't :)

So probably they're just playing it safe for now, but I don't consider it unlikely that there might be a firmware update in the future

[ And just to clarify - neither I nor the MorphOS team has anything to do with OF development. This is bplan's business.]

Quote:

You could ask him if both graphics cards are initialised by OF, or only the AGP one.

He told both cards are available in the screenmode
requester. Perhaps that doesn't mean that both can
work flawlessly together. I'll ask him to make some
more tests.

Quote:

My firmware is about the same date as yours (IIRC), but my Pegasos is a bit out of reach ATM, so can't tell you exactly. Maybe Henes will be as nice as to power it on and tell me the version of my OF? ;)

It'd be nice having some more ppl with 2005's firmware
playing a bit with gfx combos and tell us the result ;)

Quote:

Well, I can't speak for bplan, but a good guess could be that releasing a new firmware which works on all board revisions, and in general not introduces more new problems than it fixes, probably takes quite a bit of testing and quality assurance.

Well, since he bought a Peg with an updated firmware
I assume bplan think it's safe...

Quote:

Well, what's available in MorphOS really has nothing to do with the firmware as such. Ask him to abort the boot sequence while inside the firmware (black screen, white text) and ask him if there's a picture on both monitors.


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... for that board revision ;)