Hello all,

What news about support of new 3D graphic card on MorphOS please ?

What is the best 3D card for the moment on PowerMac G5 and in a near future please ?

Need a X5000 to suppport best graphic card or a G5 is suffisant ?

Thanks for your answer !

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Hi Papi, the cards above the R500 that were just given driver support, only have 2D drivers at this point, so for 3D we are still limited to the X1950Pro AGP or X1950XT PCI-E cards (the X1950XTX might work as well).

But Mark did mention that cards after the R500 based models have no 2D primitives, so all the functions for the 2D drivers for the new cards were created with 3D instructions.

Mark should be pretty familiar with those instructions by now, and while I have no idea when, I'm sure he'll have 3D drivers readied eventually.

Right now, you've got him working on Javascript JIT implementation.

> What news about support of new 3D graphic card on MorphOS please ?

None with MorphOS 3.10, as Jim said.

> What is the best 3D card for the moment on PowerMac G5 [...]?

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=12059&forum=11

> Need a X5000 to suppport best graphic card or a G5 is suffisant ?

PCIe Radeon X1950 XTX on X5000 should be faster than AGP Radeon X850 XT on G5, and also faster than AGP Radeon X1950 XT on G5 (because MorphOS doesn't support AGP transfers when going through the RIALTO AGP-to-PCIe bridge).

>PCIe Radeon X1950 XTX on X5000 should be faster than AGP Radeon X850 XT on G5, and also faster than AGP Radeon X1950 XT on G5 (because MorphOS doesn't support AGP transfers when going through the RIALTO AGP-to-PCIe bridge).

Yes, Mark mentioned a possible bridge fix in 3.11 that would make him comfortable releasing a driver for Radeon HD3850 AGP cards, that same fix might applied to the driver for the R500's like the X1950Pro AGP cards.

But again, at this point, no 3D drivers for R600s.
If that changes, you would be better off spending the extra money for an R600.

That would probably be the last major upgrade for the AGP G5's, as R700 support for AGP would only bring us the HD 4650 and 4670, which don't perform significantly better than the 3850, but do have slightly more uneven performance.

Obviously the future is in PCI-E, so an X5000 is going to offer our best (supported) PCI-E platform.

Thanks a lot for you return !

No support of PCI-e on G5, why ? No documentation ? More difficult ?

> No support of PCI-e on G5

MorphOS-supported G5 PowerMacs are AGP-based, so don't have PCIe. And PCIe is surely not the reason PCIe-based G5 PowerMacs (PowerMac11,2) are not supported so far.

> why ?

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=12146&forum=11&start=14

The only real stumbling block in that group being temperature and fan speed control.
A G5 running it's fans at full speed generates quite a racket.

The NIC might be provided by a card.

If you think about it though, it's hard to believe that just those requirements are holding this back.
After all, isn't it "camp red" that takes a year or more to do network drivers, and how different can temperature and fan speed control be on the 11,2?

We have also heard comments about the developers worries about supporting too many systems.

Anything else would be pure speculation.

> isn't it "camp red" that takes a year or more to do network drivers

MorphOS doesn't support the P5020's ethernet controller either. But yes, as there is MorphOS for Cyrus/X5000, unsupported onboard ethernet shouldn't be a reason for holding back a release.

> We have also heard comments about the developers worries
> about supporting too many systems.

If that's a reason they should drop support for some older platforms in favour of PowerMac11,2 support :-)

>If that's a reason they should drop support for some older platforms in favour of PowerMac11,2 support

In away they did. They no longer support legacy Amigas equipped with PPC processor cards.

But yes, some effort has gone into supporting things like PowerMac G4 Cube and G4 eMac support, and neither of those was particularly practical.
Most eMac built-in monitors fail before the computer actually dies, so find one with a good display is difficult.
And the frequency limits of the Cube (without a third party accelerator, which generates more heat than is good for the limited cooling capacity of that design) make it less than ideal.

But if you start knocking off early systems, then you come to Genesi platforms like the Efika and Pegasos 1 & 2.

And eliminating legacy platforms would offend some people (although, I'd assume that all current platforms will be unsupported after an ISA shift)

However, I'm not even sure how they test new releases on the bulk of the supported platforms.

Is there at one of each still retained by a member of the development team?

> if you start knocking off early systems, then you come to Genesi platforms
> like the Efika and Pegasos 1 & 2.

Actually, the Efika 5200B was released in November 2006, so is more recent than any PPC Mac (last one was discontinued in August 2006) ;-) And many MorphOS-supported PPC Macs are older than the Pegasos II (December 2003), some are even older than the Pegasos I (2002).
I for one wouldn't mind discontinued support for Efika 5200B and Pegasos I at least (maybe even Pegasos II), if it would help the MorphOS team to improve support for PowerMac11,2 somehow :-)

>I for one wouldn't mind discontinued support for Efika 5200B and Pegasos I at least (maybe even Pegasos II), if it would help the MorphOS team to improve support for PowerMac11,2 somehow

Since I don't own any of those, neither would I, but any remaining users might object.

Still, the retention of 5200B and G3 based systems doesn't make sense.

And 11,2 support would likely bring more registrations than the X5000.

In my opinion the Devs should concentrate on the ISA shift. Instead support every piece of PPC Mac's out there. What would be the benefit of supporting the 11,2 Mac? Only slightly better graphic cards. But the G5 is today in many cases slower then my Mobile phone(Sony Xperia XZ2). When I browse the internet on my Phone the websites (full sites not mobile) opens faster then on my G5.
I say go for AMD64! Then we can get us a nice Ryzen system maybe a Ravenridge with built-in Vega and have a gigantic boost in performance.

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A Radeon HD 6870 is significantly more powerful than a Radeon X1950Pro or Apple X800XT AGP card.

Although I agree with you that an AND64 Ryzen processor based platform would be a nice target.

But, again, the work needed to adopt the 11,2 PowerMac isn't that much. Fan speed and temp control primarily.

Either way,with KVM & QEMU, Power 9 will eventually be able to emulate PPC32, PPC64, and X64 ISAs, so discussion of continued PPC support is irrelevant.

Because its already a certainty.

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Ok the Radeon 6000 Series is much fester but what do you gain? What Software/Game need this Power? It would only make sense if the driver for that card would offer opencl to do h264 encode and decode with the GPU.

It's like riding a dead horse. Wenn need to look forward and not to play with hardware that is from the last decade/century. For this we have Clasic Amiga and Pegasos and PowerMac. More then enough to play with.
Get yourself an PowerMac with AGP with 2.7 or 2.3 GHz like i did and wait for AMD64.

> When I browse the internet on my Phone the websites
> (full sites not mobile) opens faster then on my G5.

That may be also due to JavaScript JIT compiler vs. JavaScript interpreter rather than just actual hardware performance.

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I had a 2.7, the 2.5 Quad is a more powerful platform, even when using only one core.
And using all four under Linux? That's a bigger gap.

So, either way, 11, 2 supported, buying an X5000, yet another AGP G5 (which won't give me access to the gpus I want to use), whatever.

Right now, I'm just hoping for better emulation via KVM and QEMU on a Power 9 platform.

And the appeal to me of using yet another X64 OS?
Not quite as great as it seems to many of you.
I already use that daily for productivity apps, and for gaming?
What would be the point?

Anybody under the delusion we will be able to come up with something better than DirectX or Vulkan?

> It would only make sense if the driver for that card would offer
> opencl to do h264 encode and decode with the GPU.

...or UVD to at least decode H264.

> For this we have [...] PowerMac.

Just not PowerMac11,2, the last PowerMac there was :-)

> And the appeal to me of using yet another X64 OS? [...] I already use that
> daily for productivity apps, and for gaming? What would be the point?

And the appeal of using yet another PPC OS like MorphOS or AROS/PPC on the PowerMac11,2 or the Talos II? PPC OS like Linux can already be used on them, so what would be the point? ;-)

> Anybody under the delusion we will be able to come up with something
> better than DirectX or Vulkan?

Vulkan would be nice. It doesn't have to be better than that. MorphOS on x64 wouldn't make less sense just because it had nothing better.

>Vulkan would be nice. It doesn't have to be better than that. MorphOS on x64 wouldn't make less sense just because it had nothing better.

As good would be a good trick.
We've discussed Vulkan before,and I mentioned Mark's comment about wanting kiero's help on any upgrade from MiniGL.

At the least, we're going to need an updated OpenGL.

In any case, I'm not suggesting that a full rebuild of MorphOS PPC should bedone, I'd like to see it, but I understand the impracticality.

But, as you've said, this is the last PowerMac G5, I don't see the point in not supporting it.

> MiniGL

That's TinyGL for the blue ones :-)

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Wow, I really made a mistake there, eh?
Funny, when I think of TinyGL I think of the more restricted projects that preceded the MorphOS developers' adoption of that name.

Out of curiosity, what API does everyone think would be best for improving 3D support.
A more up to date, fuller featured implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, something else?

One thing, MorphOS doesn't run fans full speed on G5 PCIe. It runs fans more or less middle speed.

[ Edited by zukow 31.05.2018 - 21:15 ]

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Yes, I wasted some of Mark's time confirming that yesterday.
I should have just waited until someone volunteered that.

I don't want to eat up his time.

So, what do you think about PowerMac11 support?
To me it seems like low hanging fruit.

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Of course you can ask zukow what he thinks about PowerMac11 support but in the end it is not up to him if it ever gets supported in a public release ... :)

You can even say that it seems like a low hanging fruit but this won't make the support in a public MorphOS release more likely, either.

Support simply is not ready for prime time yet for various reasons and it is yet uncertain if it ever will be.

X5000/P50x0 support is a completely different story, Mark and I were pretty aware that it wouldn't vastly increase the MorphOS userbase when we started to add support for it.

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Yes, we discussed it before it was a commitment.
I understand that it provides us a platform that is available new, and that the point wasn't about the # of new registrations.

When has this ever been about income?

But the PowerMac 11 is close to supported already, and many more users could afford this then could budget in an X5000/X0.

Further,if we're overdue for an ISA switch how many are going to commit to purchasing an X5000 that aren't already OS4 users?

The last two major adoptions (SAM460, X5000) seem geared toward that community, so how about the rest of us that were already here?

We've been following the adoption and support of Apple PPC hardware, and we don't get our hardware for free.
That definitely limits the number of us that are going to make the X5000 upgrade.
That and the knowledge that a Quad G5 can probably top an X5000's performance.
And the fact its the last, and still the most powerful PPC system aimed at the desktop market.

Frankly, if I'm going to spend as much as an X5000 costs, I'd rather spend the extra $200 or so that a basic Power 9 system would entail. But that won't receive support.

All that not adopting the PowerMac 11 really does is produce a dampening effect on the community. so that people slowly leave rather than wait for the performance boost an X64 shift should provide.

Sure, you can dictate where the OS is going, but once you're down to a handful of us and the remaining developers, will you all see the point in going to the trouble to continue further?

I don't think we are making an unreasonable request.
That,or you can keep running this like a private club and continue to further alienate the community at large.

Edit: Apparently I was wrong about PPC emulation via QEMU, someone has corrected me and it apparently might be up to the task.
Also, an X64 platform is probably the better choice for concurrently running Windows, MacOS, or Linux via VM (no QEMU emulation of the cpu required).

That being said, I'd still argue that 11,2 support (and possibly Power 9 support) make sense as a final MorphOS PPC development.

But as cyfm has pointed out, its not my choice.

Then again, wherever the developers lead us, I'm sure that if they have the resources to produce it the end result will be spectacular.

[ Edited by Jim 31.05.2018 - 17:57 ]