Not Happy with new SAM

[cehofer]

You should get support.

But, nature of the OS-4 beast. You only get a limited Radeon HD driver with the OS.
That's why you get Enhancer, for a better Radeon HD and RX driver.

But it needs to be installed correctly before use. or as you discovered (chicken or egg)

Which is why dealers want to do the setup?

BTW, Amigans is a better site for help...

but the Hyperion site also has the basic anwsers!

keep asking

Is there some "Secret Decoder Ring" / Procedure of how to install these drivers?  Installing The Enhancer addons is pretty straight forward and simple.  It must be bad scripting on their part to make sure the old Radeon file gets written over and the new proper one gets put in its place.

[nbache]

So are you saying that SFS/00 is self healing?

No, only that SFSCheck works only on SFS\00, not on SFS\02.

Best regards,

Niels

[F0LLETT]

It would be nice if Aeon, since they own the Radeon drivers would have an FAQ of what each driver handles.  It took me forever to get mini GL working on the RX550.  You would think that the "Boing Ball" of all screen savers would work!  You would also think they would have it on amisphere at the time but I had to wait a couple months to get a cd from Amigakit.

As Niels said, Screen blanker "Boing Ball" is nothing to do with us. It was broken by an OS update. Can't remember which, but it was around 8+ years ago.

[cehofer]

No, you are incorrect.  It has to do with that you need a secret decoder ring as what driver you need with what Radeon card.  I mispoke that it was my RX550 it was my Sapphire R9 X280.  The HD Radeon driver does NOT support anything with miniGL and it took me a couple months to figure out asking finally on Amigans that I needed yet the correct Warp driver to support MiniGL.  My advice was also wrong as I waited a couple months to get the RadeonHD from Amigakit because it was NOT available on Amiphere and it turned out to be the Warp3d driver on Amiphere to support my Souther Islands x280 RadeonHD card.   So after $150 US, I finally got it working paying for 3 drivers one of which I didnt need. 

[Hans_]

Sorry to hear about your experience. It sounds ilke a lot of this could have been avoided if the motherboard came with a "rescue USB flash drive" containing AmigaOS4 with the Enhancer and other bits pre-installed (e.g., the NovaBridge driver for backward compatibility with the old Warp3D & MiniGL). Ideally it would include an installer to help you set up AmigaOS on the hard drive.

Your experience shows how fragmented things have become. I wrote NovaBridge to provide backward compatibility and finally end the graphics driver confusion. Sadly, the confusion will remain until it comes bundled with all new machines.

A few quick comments:
- Making the OS multi-core is a tough problem. So tough, that certain individuals have been loudly proclaiming that it's impossible to add to AmigaOS. It is being worked on, will eventually be released for all multi-core machines (including the X5000)

- AmigaOS' browsers are seriously lagging behind. AFAIK, our browsers do 100% of rendering on the CPU, so there's zero graphics acceleration. This is why performance can be slow. And yes, there are bugs that cause Odyssey to crash on some sites. Sadly, nobody is maintaining Odyssey, so nobody is trying to fix it. There is a team working on porting the latest WebKit to AmigaOS 4, with the goal of creating an updated browser. I'm not sure what the status of that project is. Progress is slow

- I don't remember SAM460s having trouble with Candi. I usually don't run it. IIRC, it has a low CPU usage version that will pause the animation when the rest of the system needs more CPU power

- HDMI not working is a driver issue. Actually, it's likely caused by bad tables on the graphics card's ROM. The driver has a quirk table to work around these, but it's incomplete. These quirks has been a very frustrating part of driver development

- The SAM460 is noticeably slower than the X5000, even with only one core. You might not notice it too much if you start with the Sam, but you notice it if you've been using an X5000 and switch back to the Sam

Hans

[cehofer]

Hans,

Thanks for you detailed reply.  On previous versions of the SAM460, do they also not have a driver for the RX550 to display the Kickstart screens or is that new to the SAM460LE?

If it is the ROM table on my X280, why does it work just fine in my X5040?  Does it have a better driver?  The only issue I had on my X5040 with my Radeon x280HD is the miniGL Warp3d driver missing. 

I figured out the "Low CPU" option on Candi and someone told me to make the "Interrupt=false" on the 7900 driver which sped things up too.

Yes there is a HUGE performance difference between the X5040 and the SAM460LE. 

My X5040 2220 MHz Results VS:
SortBench Results:    1K        2k       4K        8K         16k     32k                 MIPS
X5000 1995. %     -10.01.   -9.67  - 9.75  -10.18   -10.01 -10.12.            -10.19
SAM460EX 1150 %-82.81 -81.84 -83.84 -125.86 -512.67 -628.54           -91.28

[Hans_]

Thanks for you detailed reply.  On previous versions of the SAM460, do they also not have a driver for the RX550 to display the Kickstart screens or is that new to the SAM460LE?

You mean to display the UBoot screen? That doesn't work on older Sam460s, either. The problem is that the RX 500 series only includes UEFI GOP. AMD ditched the old VGABIOS, and no longer included it with new graphics cards. The Sam460's UBoot was too old for UEFI GOP, and only supports VGABIOS.

Ironically, I used the Sam460 to develop the RadeonRX driver because, while the UBoot screen wasn't visible on the RX 500 series, at least it would boot (unlike my X1000). I could still access UBoot via the serial port, using a null-modem cable and another computer.

If it is the ROM table on my X280, why does it work just fine in my X5040?  Does it have a better driver?  The only issue I had on my X5040 with my Radeon x280HD is the miniGL Warp3d driver missing. 

I completely missed that detail. Very weird behaviour. The drivers on both systems are the same. If it works properly on the X5040, but not the Sam460, then perhaps the low-level initialization done by UBoot on the Sam460 is a bit wonky. I vaguely remember there being problems with some Southern Islands GPUs (of which the X280 is one). ACube updated UBoot to improve compatibility.

I figured out the "Low CPU" option on Candi and someone told me to make the "Interrupt=false" on the 7900 driver which sped things up too.

Huh? Disabling vblank interrupts usually wastes more CPU time because it switches from using interrupts for vblank waits to busy-waiting (i.e., the CPU sits in a loop checking if the VBlank has arrived). It also has the undesirable side-effect of making animations more jerky.

Yes there is a HUGE performance difference between the X5040 and the SAM460LE. 

My X5040 2220 MHz Results VS:
SortBench Results:    1K        2k       4K        8K         16k     32k                 MIPS
X5000 1995. %     -10.01.   -9.67  - 9.75  -10.18   -10.01 -10.12.            -10.19
SAM460EX 1150 %-82.81 -81.84 -83.84 -125.86 -512.67 -628.54           -91.28

That's quite a striking difference.

Hans

[cehofer]

Hans,

I contacted Acube and they said to reach out to you or Aeon for help with my HDMI not working on my x280.  I can connect a serial cable and post the output on boot of that will help.

[Hans_]

@cehofer

I contacted Acube and they said to reach out to you or Aeon for help with my HDMI not working on my x280.  I can connect a serial cable and post the output on boot of that will help.

Did ACube understand that it's only failing on the Sam460?

There's no harm in logging the debug output (from the debug version of the driver), but there are no guarantees that it'll give anything useful to explain why it works on the X5000 but not the Sam460. You can submit a report to A-EON's bug tracker here

NOTE: With driver debug logs, please do NOT use the debug kernel. Apart from messing with the timings, the debug kernel can flood the logs with irrelevant info.

Hans