Hi,

I bought a powermac g4 single cpu little money on ebay 50 €!!!, I installed morphos amazing, I'm an old Amiga user, and the question that maybe the graphics card did not work anymore because the screen stays black now I'm waiting for another graphics card we hope to use it again morph.

ps. maybe buy a g5 what do you think?

Hi all

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Hi and welcome.

Get a G5 if you can as they really are fantastic machines. My 2.7GHz DP G5 makes my 1.67GHz Powerbook G4 feel like my A1200 by comparison! :)

Welcome to MorphOS!! Its always great to see new users join the platform. As for graphics cards you can find a radion 9000 for super cheap to test it Im sure.

I recommend either a powermac g4 quicksilver or a powerbook g4 laptop.

I do not recommend the mac g5 for several reasons:
1) no support for pci cards.
2) no support for audio jacks. sounds come out of built in speaker only and it is very low.
3) trouble with any video card not a radeon 9600.

I have a mac g5 and it is 2.5 times faster than a g4 but a powerbook g4 will play RTCW ten times faster and give you less issues, plus its portable.

@bash
>2) no support for audio jacks. sounds come out
>of built in speaker only and it is very low.

a) did you boot with speakers connected ? AFAIR there is some issue with switching outputs while running.
(actually just stopping and restarting whatever plays the sound should be sufficient)

b) did you report that as a bug ? Back in the 3.2 beta-phase my 2.3GHz had similar issues which were eventually be resolved, so it might be just another tiny variation somewhere.

@sabbate
Since you allready have a new GFX-card ordered, there is no point on rushing to a G5.
Depending on the specs of your G4 it might even be worth registering. If it's just a <800MHz with no extras I would look out for a good deal on better HW.

MacMini, PowerBook, G5 all depending on your needs.

> I have a mac g5 [...] but a powerbook g4 will play RTCW ten times faster

Ten times faster or just "almost twice as fast"? :-)

the radeon 9600 is a VERY slow card.
It is quite aweful.
RTCW is almost not playable.

> the radeon 9600 is a VERY slow card. It is quite aweful. RTCW is almost not playable.

The game is very playable with an even slower 9200, so I guess it's not due to the graphics card performance per se.

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I'm sure I played the original game on a crappy old Duron with a Geforce 2MX when it first came out.

9600 is a better card surely?

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My PowerBook (5,6) has Radeon 9600 on board. As a man who finished the whole game two times on this PowerBook on "I'm a death incarnate" level, I can say that you are wrong, or R9600 is only that slow with G5 processor...

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ACILLLLLL!!!!11!

Since you came back from the grave figure I would. I wish I had a G5 to see morphos on it. Must be crazy fast.

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Umm on my Peg2 G4 with Radeon 9000 Pro II its very fast and seems great framerate. So 9600 is R300 and should be way faster no?

I hope I can have fun with mos

Sorry, on my G5 with radeon 9600 it lags bad.
RTCW plays quite nicely on the powerbook g4 with radeon 9700m.
I do not know why that is, maybe I tweak the settings to the max by force of habit.

I have to agree there is something up with the G5 version of MorphOS atm. Games like Torcs and
SpeedDreams run like garbage on this machine and I find it hard to believe they tax it so hard given
the primitive gfx of those games. Also the non-working pci is a big issue since it's impossible to record
sound into this setup. Some things seem faster but in other regards the G4 systems are actually better.
I hope the upcoming update can solve a few of these issues. Compatibility is a problem with no
16bit screenmodes either.

I am very glad to have the G5 version of MorphOS working at all but await improvements in the
next version(s). Maybe we need a new version of GCC more optimal for G5 architecture? Surely
Games should run better on this setup than on G4 systems with slower ram, lesser video cards &
slower motherboard...

> Maybe we need a new version of GCC more optimal for G5 architecture?

This might interest you then:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&u=http://morphos.pl/586

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You sound as amazed as the Motorolla engineers and programmers when Sven Luther and I demoed an ODW Peg2 running Debian GLX Gears Faster than a G5 (which was a big deal in 2003) Its amazing what the Altivec engine does..

> Its amazing what the Altivec engine does.

Just for the record, the G5 has AltiVec too.

I am starting to think Torcs and SpeedDreams are just not very optimal games at all.
They seem to run at crawl speeds on here whereas RTCW is actually pretty good.
Turning off enhanced displays seems to help a lot of stuff run fast too. OWB scrolling
and window movement is instaneous that way. A nice tip from 'intuition' in the other thread.

I'll admit I was a little surprised how poorly those driving games ran. I prefer arcade racing
games anyway. Something like Daytona USA, F-Zero or Ridge Racer would be great.

[ Edited by realstar 10.07.2013 - 04:57 ]

If I assume correctly, Enhanced Display uses the 3D compositing engine to render the screen.

By my limited understanding this should be faster/smoother than 2D rendering but it isn't. Anyone more knowledgeable on the subject able to explain why to we mere mortals?

I took a G5 dual 1.8 Ghz the G4 stopped working just as well that I paid only 50 euro

> If I assume correctly, Enhanced Display uses the 3D compositing engine
> to render the screen.

I'd even go so far as to say that Enhanced Display *is* the 3D compositing engine.

> By my limited understanding this should be faster/smoother than 2D rendering but
> it isn't. Anyone more knowledgeable on the subject able to explain why to we
> mere mortals?

I can imagine 2 general situations where Enhanced Display gets slow:

1. Enhanced Display needs more VRAM than 2D display. So if the VRAM can't hold all screen data, swapping to main RAM kicks in.

2. Enhanced Display is only fast when all graphic effects are done by the GPU. If the graphics driver for some GPU doesn't support all effects, the CPU has to do the remaining ones.

I guess there might be more causes for slow Enhanced Display, but I can think of just those two right now.

If it's quite slow and has stalls, then it's about lack of gfx mem for sure...

Enhanced display might not be the fastest always, but it for example doesn't have tearing when moving windows, doesn't slow down with many overlappng windows etc. I think it's slower when you have to copy new data on screen... like for example when scrolling OWB page, it's faster on non-enhanced screen.