Amithlon & GFX-cards: any advice?

[humppa]

I recently dug out my dusty copy of Amithlon and gave it a shot on my Nforce2 system.

While it initially refused to fully boot from CDRom, I finally managed to boot from a USB pen-drive using the latest kernal from Bombcrater (kudos btw!). Next I freed some space on my harddisk and installed OS3.9 on it, so things are looking fine for now.
The next thing I'll try is to get NForce2 LAN and sound working, since both seem to be supported by the latest kernals.

The only problem for now: My Geforce 6800 is only supported with VESA, so there is no hardware acceleration which makes everything quite sluggish.

What are your experiences regarding GFX cards and Amithlon?  I'll have to make a compromise, since I am also using the computer with Windows, so the card shouldn't be too slow.

This is what I am looking for:

The fastest AGP GFX card that has HW-acceleration in Amithlon, is still passively cooled and has working DVI connectors.

Are the Geforce FX 5200 and 5500 really the fastest cards which fit these criteria? Any other suggestions? What about ATI cards? There are even some Geforce4 MX with DVI connector, would those work?

[humppa]

Humppa, Gary just released a new kernel, which has support for the 6800 series.

W00t! Are you sure? I had a look at the Amithlon list and Gary's website and couldn't find any news on that.

6800 hw-support would be perfect, since I am most happy with my current card (passively cooled). All other cards would be a major downgrade (at least in Windows)...

[humppa]

Don't expect *ANY* Warp3D, unless you have a voodoo and so far, I was unsuccessful using it, so I just went back to my 5200.

I already tried a Voodoo 3000 (PCI) which I wpreviously using with my Mediator. With the latest kernal (kern310) it only worked in VESA mode. Are there any kernals that support Voodoo in hw-acceleration?

Btw, how is your 5200 working in Amithlon? Did you try DVI?

If you're using the AC97 Codec, let me know and I can send you the AC97 mixer, so you can turn the CDRom sound on.

Thanks, sounds great, I'll send you a PM. My mainboard has a AC97 v2.2 Realtek ALC650, so I'll guess it _should_ work with the Codec and Amithlon.

@TrevorDick

Thanks, already knew the website. Not all models are listed there, so I was looking for some experience from Amithlon users. The table lists DVI as "N/A" on some older Geforce models. I wonder if this is because it's not supported or rather because only few of those cards _have_ DVI conncetors.

[humppa]

As for your mainboard, some versions of the AC97 codec will crash the Mixer. My old box would do that, so I had to install a SB512, just to turn on the sound. (Why it's off, by default, is beyond me.)

Ok, hope I'm lucky. Thanks for the AC97-mixer by the way.

DVI does work, though I'm also using a monitor converter, but I can affirm that it will use the dual heads of a GForce.

Ok, so the FX 5200 could be a possible alternative to my Geforce 6800 if I can't get it to work with hw-acceleration.

Are you sure about Geforce 6800 support? Would this be an inofficial kernel newer than 3.10? I'd love to do some betatesting.

[humppa]

@DrBombcrater

Thanks for the clarifications.

I might get myself a FX5200 then. Things are just too sluggish with only VESA on my Geforce 6800.

The idea of running Amithlon on laptops sounds interesting. Are there already any "Amithlon-proven" laptops? At least the Geforce FX Go seems to be working with hw-acceleration (listed on your homepage).

Keep up the good work!

[humppa]

@DrBombcrater

* The most modern cards supported at the moment are the GeForce FX series. The driver for these is fast and stable, although there are issues with some 'odd' FX cards (5100,5500 and some 5700s) not being picked up correctly.

I'm no expert in this, but when assuming that all FX-cards can use the same kernel-driver for hw-acceleration (could be wrong on this), isn't it just a matter of adding all chip-IDs ("NV**") to the kernel?

GeForce FX5950 Ultra    NV38
GeForce FX5900 Ultra    NV35
GeForce FX5900            NV35
GeForce FX5900 XT    NV35
Geforce FX5800          NV30
GeForce FX5700 Ultra    NV36
GeForce FX5700            NV36
GeForce FX5700 LE       NV36
GeForce FX5600 Ultra     NV31
GeForce FX5600            NV31
GeForce FX5500            NV34
GeForce FX5200 Ultra    NV34
GeForce FX5200            NV34

I am asking because I found a good deal on a cheap FX5500 card and just wanted to make sure that it's supported.
The FX5500 is basically a FX5200 with some minor modifications, so if it is "seen" as a FX5200 that shouldn't cause any problems.

It's not any different with the FX Quadro-cards. They work fine when using the driver of their Geforce counterpart. (You can even flash firmware between the models). But I guess their chip-IDs are needed:

Quadro FX 1000    NV30GL (same as FX5800)
Quadro FX 1100    NV36 (same as FX5700)
Quadro FX 2000    NV30GL (same as FX5800)
Quadro FX 3000      NV35GL (same as FX5900)
Quadro FX 600     NV34GL (same as FX5200 Ultra)

this also applies to other series, e.g.

Quadro 4 980 XGL  NV28GL (same as GeForce4 Ti4200-8x)
or
Quadro NVS 200    NV17GL (GeForce4 MX)

Btw, good news on laptop-support, I am currently looking for an older laptop as a "living-room surf station" and with Amithlon-support, the Acer looks like a good choice. :-)

[humppa]

@DrBombcrater

If only it were that simple!

The NV3x series are not all exactly register compatible.

Ok, that explains a lot. I thought they'd at least be compatible regarding 2D-acceleration.

In any case it should work with Quadro-cards that are using the same chips as their Geforce-counterparts. Does Kernel 3.10 already have their PCI IDs? If not, would it help if I look them up for you (for adding them in a future version)?

On Amithlonopen I read that you were working on Voodoo3 support at some point, but only had a half-working beta version at that time. Any possibility for sending me that kernel? I'd really like to test...

[humppa]

Hmm, I just discovered that all 8bit modes have the colours completely mixed up. I am using "VESA-1" in Picasso96Mode.
All 16bit and 32bit modes look fine and I can use resolutions from 640x480 up to 1280x1024.
All ECS games or system-friendly demos that open an own screen look wrong too. Is there any way to make software which uses the OCS/ECS chipset in a system friendly way more compatible with Amithlon? Has anybody already tried ModePro?
Do I still need to keep the PAL/NTSC screenmodes or can I delete them (colours look wrong on them too)?

Btw, I tried to extend beyond the standard VESA-settings, but none of my Setconfig settings (pixelclock, etc.) are picked up by Picasso96Mode.

[humppa]

I just got myself a cheap FX5200 on ebay, hopefully this will eliminate the few remaining issues (scrolling speed and 256 colour modes).

[humppa]

@Methuselas

Humppa, if it makes you feel better, I've never seen any problems with my FX5200 and I've been using it steadily for almost 4 years now.

Great. Hope to get it working too then. Only really sad to give up on the Geforce 6800 (passively cooled, extremely fast, 16 pipelines). The fastest Amithlon compatible card seems to be the 5950 Ultra (very noisy!). Whatever, the FX5200 should be fine for my purpose (testing Amithlon).  

I was going to build a new Amithlon box and get a new gfx card, but seeing as I haven't had problems with the 5200, I may just save myself the cash and not build a new one.

Yeah, what about a NForce4 system with a 5950 Ultra for Amithlon? :-D

Sad to hear about the 3D stuff. I only barely know about Quarktex, but what are the reasons why it doesn't work with Amithlon?

[humppa]

Unfortunately my "WinFast A350 XT TDH" from LeadTek with FX5900 only gives me blinking keyboard LED's.
As does an Asus 6600GT but this was expected.

Are you really sure this is caused by the GFX cards and not by some other issues? Have you changed AGP Aperture Size in your BIOS? Which kernel are you running? Make sure that all updates are installed.
With the latest kernel, both of your cards should at least be supported by VESA. My Geforce 6800 works fine with Amithlon, there is just no HW-acceleration (only VESA).
I also was first stuck with the flashing LED problem. However, all went fine after I upgraded to a recent kernel and limited memory to 512MB ("mem=512m").
What kind of chipset do you have (mainboard)?

[humppa]

That the results are sometimes a little ragged is, I hope, excusable given those circumstances.

Excusable? The results are _very much_ appreciated! Looking at all the past work you did for Amithlon, I just _don't_ want to imagine where we would stand without your great contributions and support.

I am here running Amithlon on an Athlon XP 2900+, fully working on-board sound and LAN (Nforce2 chipset), working DMA, 768MB of RAM and (tomorrow if I am lucky) even with Geforce FX accelerated graphics. So a big "Thank you!" for that.

[humppa]

Bah, FX5200 didn't arrive yet, so I thought I'll benchmark my Geforce 6800 before removing it to kill some time. ;-)

It's actually performing quite well in some modes while being dog-slow in (apparently unaccelerated) other functions:

| GFX system....: Picasso96               |
| Resolution....: 1024 x 768 x 24         |
| Depth/Colors..: 16777216 colors         |
| Testlength....: 13                      |

.============= SPEEDRESULTS ==============.
| RectFill()................    647 op/s  |
| RectFill() Pattern........    651 op/s  |
| WritePixel().............. 2252845 op/s |
| WriteChunkyPixels().......   4937 op/s  |
| WritePixelArray8()........   4936 op/s  |
| WritePixelLine8()......... 171056 op/s  |
| DrawEllipse().............  89452 op/s  |
| DrawCircle()..............  87446 op/s  |
| Draw()....................  23326 op/s  |
| Draw() Hor/Ver............  50647 op/s  |
| ScrollRaster() X..........      2 op/s  |
| ScrollRaster() Y..........      2 op/s  |
| PutText().................  40289 op/s  |
| BlitBitMap()..............    219 op/s  |
| BlitBitMapRastPort()......    218 op/s  |
| BitMapScale().............    196 op/s  |

ScrollRaster seems equally slow as on Shadowwolf's 6600GT, so I actually don't believe that it's just because you fried your card.

The only thing really killing the joy on VESA-only cards is the jerkyness of v-scrolling internet sites and text windows.
I'm already curious how those benchmarks will look with the FX5200. :-)

[humppa]

And while it still has a fan at least the 5900XT we already have is a lot less noisy than the TI4200.

If I remember correctly, the MSI and Creative Labs (identical) 5900XT models had relatively quiet fans.Do you have one of those? If there would only be a completely silent model with a heatpipe in the 5900-range such as my Gigabyte GV-68128DH.

[humppa]

Today I finally received my FX5200, hooked it up, booted into Amithlon and only got a black screen.

Then I found out that DVI is not working! Analogue VGA display works well though. Am I really the first one who can't get DVI to work on a Geforce FX?

Do I have to change any settings in order to get DVI working?

Here is some information, maybe that helps tracking down the problem which is hopefully not hardware-related (DVI works in Windows):

When booting, I get this:
"rivafb: nvidia device/chipset 322"
"rivafb: RIVA MTRR set to ON"

At the end of booting, the text "Opening framebuffer: no such device" is displayed. The FX is well detected and HW-acceleration is working:
"xcat /proc/fb    0   GeForce FX 5200"
I can select between the "builtin" screenmodes and "NVIDIA-1" screenmodes.
With "vga=***" I tried different modes, but I think these only have any effect for VESA cards, right?

Do I have to set "video=***" to something? Somewhere I found the setting "video=rivafb:640x480,flatpanel=1" but that only resulted in two black modes (VGA and DVI) when I tested it.

I could also try different "setconfig >NIL: p96_accell" settings, but I don't really know where to start or if those have any effect at all.

Another oddity with "kern310":
"xcat /proc/version" gives me:
"3.0.0-test1(2.4.19-pre4) compiled 19 Dec 2005"
Am I using an old kernel or is it just a version number/date that wasn't bumped?

Thanks for any help in advance!

This is the GFX-card that I bought.