Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Tafka on January 27, 2003, 01:29:23 PM
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Okay, I'm totally confused by this.
Some people say that the AmigaOne will support the Radeon 9100 which is a rebadged(?) 8500. Yet, if you go to some sites they are only bundling the LE version of the 8500.
So what is it?
Also, consider this (taken from the AOS4 announcement):
"The first installment of OS 4 will include the current V4 of the generic Warp3D low-level driver
system. For the time being, both the Permedia 2 and Voodoo 3 graphics cards will be supported,
with Radeon support to follow."
So, are we all wasting our time getting these cards now or what? Also how do I know I'll still be able to get hold of an 8500 when OS4 eventually gets Radeon support. It would be ironic for the AmigaOne if the only place I can buy hardware for my "new" computer is on e-Bay.
:-x
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Warp3D support won't be available right away, but you'll get all your apps and non-warp3d retargetable games right away.
Actually, isn't there a PPC software renderer for Warp3D? With that, you'll get W3D support, and hardware acceleration will take a little longer.
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I am going to install Both Voodoo 5 5500 pci from my previous mediator
system,and a brand new ATI Radeon 8500 64Mb DDR DVI
and keep the voodoo until i can get the latest 3D drivers for the Radeon.
Hope the 5500 works well in "Voodoo 3000 compatibility mode"
:-o
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LOL
I just bought a radeon 7000 from ebay for that very purpose! :-D
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@L8-X:
I fear your face
:nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous:
:nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous:
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Maybe it can explode soon!!!
:-o:-o:-o:-o
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Ami603 wrote:
@L8-X:
I fear your face
:nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous:
:nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous::nervous:
You should, for you never want to witness the wrath of my nappies! (diapers)!!!!
:-D ;-) :-D
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This is what I've been told directly by Forefront Technologies, Inc. - those who are working on drivers (I hope I don't hurt anybody by posting this private email, but - hey! - I'm revealing no secret information and I do think that this is useful to the Amiga community):
[QUOTE - Joshua B. Helm speaks]
We plan to support all of the Radeon line, but early on we'd suggest avoiding the 9000 series boards. That's not to say they won't "just work", but they will not have been tested (nor officially supported).
[ENDQUOTE]
I'd have liked posting the whole email, but it seems impossible to cut & paste or insert an external text file...
(I'm using Galeon under Red Hat 7.3 - BTW: it's the second time I write this as the whole system crashed when I clicked on [preview] :-x )
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[QUOTE - Joshua B. Helm speaks]
We plan to support all of the Radeon line, but early on we'd suggest avoiding the 9000 series boards. That's not to say they won't "just work", but they will not have been tested (nor officially supported).
[ENDQUOTE]
BUT, does this include the 9100 which by all accounts is a relabelled 8500?
I guess the best thing to do is to wait for someone to try it.
:-(
/Me is fed up of waiting.
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Tafka wrote:
BUT, does this include the 9100 which by all accounts is a relabelled 8500?
Dunno.
Please, also note that those info date back to Dec., 15th. - things may have changed in the meanwhile.
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General advice: wait with buying hardware until you know exactly what hardware is supported by an OS you're going to buy. That will most likely be known when AmigaOS is ready for release. Hardware gets cheaper with time, not the other way round. ;)
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This site has some radeon forums link here (http://www.rage3d.com/board/index.php?s=f816eb57e6e0ced88e9638bf924e352d)
not sure if there will be anything usefull though
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>Some people say that the AmigaOne will support the
>Radeon 9100 which is a rebadged(?) 8500. Yet, if you >go to some sites they are only bundling the LE version
>of the 8500.
Like we've said before, we will release a list of officially supported cards when the drivers are ready. You can see what we have in mind to start with by looking at our web store's AmigaOne configuration options. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list, merely what will be available from us in particular, but we at this time cannot support the newer 9xxx models, as ATI has not yet released documentation on the newest Radeon chip versions. We will not officially support chips we have no documentation for, but if things happen to work anyway, that's cool. If something is flaky with the newest version but fine for older ones, we cannot properly address and fix such flakyness in chips we do not have proper documentation for. We may try, but we do not promise to try and may not, and if we do it will not be guaranteed and will not be officially supported, and anyone going against our recommendation and using 9xxx models do so at their own risk, until such time we are able to properly support them. When we are able to properly support these cards, we will let you folks know this, but until you see an announcement directly from us, please assume we still recommend against.
Now, yes, someone has said that the 9100 model in particular is a rebadged 8500. We don't know this person, and will get this rumor verified one way or another. Until then, the official answer is "no". We'll let you know if and when this official answer may change, or if the "no" gets reinforced. If the 9100 turns out to be something other than a rebadged 8500, the reinforced "no" answer may change in the future as new documentation becomes available, but not until then.
Also remember, for you people looking forward to 3D functions, while 2D may possibly (but not supported) work fine (or may not), the 3D Radeon functionality documentation is available for the older cards, but not yet for the 9500/9700. So even if 2D works, 9500/9700 users would have a longer wait for 3D support, as that has had vast changes in the new chips, and I would not expect any 8500 3D driver to work by coincidence nearly as well as a 2D driver might (or might not).
And I'd also like to mention that we've been asked why we cannot just use Linux drivers as documentation. There are a few issues here. Is Linux driver source code available for everything we need? No. The Linux drivers assume an x86 platform, and the card gets inited at power-on/POST by the x86 motherboard BIOS, not by the Linux driver. While AmigaOne's PPCboot BIOS should take care of this power-on/POST init stuff, classic Amigas don't have this, so Prometheus/Mediator versions of Radeon drivers need to do have this in the driver, and the only documentation here is what we get from ATI. (I left Grex off that list, not because it does init stuff for us, but because we have zero documentation for this PCI bus board and cannot support it at all. We tried, but DCE gave us invalid emai address to Frank Mariak who is in charge of the Grex DDK, and later email attempts to Frank with a valid email never got replied to at all. See also the recent Grex petition thread on ann.lu about IP issues in the way of them being able to share documentation, though it would have been nice if they had at least told us that rather than completely ignored our requests)
When Hyperion work on the 3D driver, not all features of the Radeon are in the Linux open-source code. Certain features, particularly texture and lighting for example, are kept proprietary, so any openly available Linux source here is not completely helpful.
And finally, what license is the Linux driver source code released under? I haven't seen what license they use. I'd hate to end up in a situation where looking at Linux driver source obligates us to release our source, conflicting withour contract with ATI which specifically forbids releasing source to anyone outside of our NDA, and we become unable to release the drivers at all.
But as I mentioned above, with Linux driver source lacking some things we need, I don't see much point in going outside the docs ATI gave us, and using Linux source as our documentation really isn't that suitable when we want to guarantee we can properly support a particular Radeon model. The Linux driver source is not comprehensive to the new Radeon version features, so we cannot comprehensively guarantee we can make everything work for the new cards by simply using Linux source. We need the complete documentation from ATI to fill in the gaps before we can make any guarantees or officially support these new cards.
Did I miss anything?
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billt wrote:
Did I miss anything?
I don't think so.
Thanks very much for the reply. It was very helpful.
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Seems like an issue I've seen brought up on a couple of lists recently by A1 board owner.
Basically, it seems to be this.
OS4 will support graphics cards a,b,c and shorlty later d, e
Linux which currently is used til OS4 is released, supports a, mostly b, d, e and f
Now if you buy the A1 with card c, it's not much use under Linux. Same if you get card b, but it kinda works under Linux. Now you could get card f which might be the best to use under Linux but will have no OS4 support.
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I think he needs his diper changed...
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Did I miss anything?
Perhaps just one more point. You can not expect to take a video driver for X and simply compile it for Picasso96. Putting aside the differences in the platforms (X86 vs PPC), the way these two graphics systems work with the drivers is completely different and not really compatible. The only thing the X drivers might be useful for is as a reference if you'd like to see how /they/ actually did something in particular, assuming that the X driver actually has the need for that piece of functionality. "Porting" of a hardware driver is really not an option.
In our case, the stuff in the X driver is the easy part, the early initialization of the hardware was the more difficult -- and as mentioned, the X driver has no need to do this early init. Even ATI seemed surprised that anyone would actually attempt to initialize the hardware manually rather than "letting the BIOS do it", which of course was not an option.
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Forget about Radeons, Voodoos and things like that!
Buy one of these instead!
http://www.bitboys.com/products_axegraphicsprocessor.htm (http://www.bitboys.com/products_axegraphicsprocessor.htm)
Ok, just joking. It's all about that "custom chipset fever" I suffer from since Caipirinha didn't make it! :-D
Well, Warp3D NOVA would be better than DirectX native support, anyway... :-D
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Thank you, Bill and Joshua. I think I learned more from your two posts than I have from everything that's been said by everyone for the last year.
Keep up the good work. May the docs be with you.
tony
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Okay, I have just gotten a confirmation about the 9100. Failing to find an email address on the ATI site, I went to Sapphire, who makes the Radeon 9100 Atlantis cards. After only a couple of hours I received the following reply:
"This card is indeed a R8500 with an updated products ID. I cannot say wether the driver works or not in other O?S."
He may not know, but I'm guessing Forefront does...
Kay
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ok, could sombody tell me this:
including ONLY the AGP graphics cards that amigaos supports, which is the best/fastest?
which would you reccomend to a person who wants the best performance, without compromise(except compatability)
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> including ONLY the AGP graphics cards that amigaos supports, which is the best/fastest?
My guess is that it would be a card based on the Radeon 8500/9100 with 128 MB ram.
Kay