Amithlon & GFX-cards: any advice?

[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.

[humppa]

Whohooo! Finally DVI!

The Geforce did not seem to autodetect my TFT panel, so I got it working using
"video=riva:640x480,flatpanel=1".
Before I got confused from reading too much on Linux-boards about kernel options and I must have accidently typed in "rivafb" instead of just "riva". Doh!  :crazy:

[humppa]

DrBombcrater wrote:
@humppa

Edit: the kernel agruments stuff is a right pain in the bum. I spent hours wondering why the FX driver was giving me a screen full of random garbage on my laptop, it turns out I typed 'video=riva:640x480, flatpanel=1' instead of 'video=riva:640x480,flatpanel=1'.

Just adding one space caused the flatpanel argument to be ignored...

Indeed. I spent the whole afternoon trying to figure it out. My missing low-level Linux experience wasn't helpful either. The output during boot "rivafb" must have made me assume that the same string could be used as a kernel argument.
Btw, I didn't know that you can even display GFX card mem and AGP aperture size from Amithlon: "xcat /proc/mtrr".
Don't know if that could be used for anything, e.g. relocating the AGP-area to circumvent the 1GB limit. Bah, I'm talking out of my butt again.  :-P

Btw, did anyone ever manage to get 1600x1200 resolutions working? I got a 20" TFT, so it could be nice running at native resolution. At the moment, all resolutions seem to run at 1280x1024 on accelerated drivers. When selecting e.g. 1024x768, a black border is displayed around the view area and my TFT still recognizes it as 1280x1024. I think you wrote in some readme that scaling does not work with DVIs.

[humppa]

The AROS driver is at the moment in sync with the XFree86 nv driver from some two years ago. Doing a diff shows that only few things changed since then which if you merge them in would give you support for gfx cards upto 7900.

Interesting. Would it also be possible to "unlock" the 1600x1200 modes there? After doing an extensive search through various forums I have come to the conclusions that nobody ever managed to successfully define a 1600x1200 or higher screenmode in Amithlon.
Just like others, I had no luck defining such modes in Picasso96Mode although they were specified according to VESA standards. When I press "test", I only get a white or black screen which my TFT recognizes as "1280x1024" and not "1600x1200". Unfortunately PicassoModeTNG doesn't run and complains about lack of memory (huh? maybe it requires a PIV).

[humppa]

It would help some people (including me) a lot, if we collect all known arguments, commands, processes together.
xcat /proc/mtrrxcat
/proc/pcixcat
/proc/ide/viaxcat
/proc/cpuinfo

Have a look here:

Link

You can find descriptions to these commands on many Linux-sites. Only problem is that they do not always apply to the (relatively old) Linux-kernel that Amithlon is using.

[humppa]

@Ratte

I used 640x480 8Bit to compare it with A4000 sample benchmarks and so on ..

Yeah, but we can't compare with our results anymore. :-P
Please do another benchmark in 1024x768-32

I made some more with my FX5200 and it seems that all FX-models perform about the same. Benchmark scores were very much the same like with Shadowolf's FX5900.
Not really surprising though, the main difference of these cards is the 3D section (completely unused in Amithlon), in 2D they should perform very similar.

[humppa]

@Ratte

Thanks, some interesting differences between your 9800 and the Geforce FX-series. The speed of several functions differs quite a lot between both. Impossible to say which card is "best" or "fastest" however I guess.

Athlon XP2900+, Nforce2, Geforce FX5200:

Code: [Select]


| RectFill()................   6016 op/s  |
| RectFill() Pattern........    667 op/s  |
| WritePixel().............. 2652861 op/s  |
| WriteChunkyPixels().......   5070 op/s  |
| WritePixelArray8()........   5068 op/s  |
| WritePixelLine8()......... 178357 op/s  |
| DrawEllipse().............  91589 op/s  |
| DrawCircle()..............  95400 op/s  |
| Draw()....................  23485 op/s  |
| Draw() Hor/Ver............  75747 op/s  |
| ScrollRaster() X..........    377 op/s  |
| ScrollRaster() Y..........    380 op/s  |
| PutText().................  40151 op/s  |
| BlitBitMap()..............  24647 op/s  |
| BlitBitMapRastPort()......  22814 op/s  |
| BitMapScale().............    245 op/s  |
|--------------- Intuition ---------------|
| OpenWindow()..............   1692 op/s  |
| MoveWindow()..............   4655 op/s  |
| SizeWindow()..............   2428 op/s  |
| CON-Output................   1083 op/s  |
| ScreenToFront()...........     51 op/s  |

[humppa]

But I have to use a CRT with the GF3, because my TFT isn´t working on GF-DVI and Amithlon.

Have you already tried to force DVI-display (see this thread)?

A little OT, but is anyone of you using

Code: [Select]

Setconfig >NIL: asynchronous_io 1

in startup-sequence to enable Asynchronous input/output?
Does it offer any advantages?

For now, I have only set a larger JIT cache size with

Code: [Select]

Setconfig >NIL: cachesize 655363

since I surely do have enough RAM.

[humppa]

Since I have a few days to think about this before the graphics card arrives: Is it possible that resolutions above 1600x1200 or at least 16:10 resolutions like 1680x1050 will ever work with Amithlon on an FX 5200 card?

I am still looking for a solution to that, although I must admit that I haven't tinkered with Amithlon for some time. Someone suggested to use "picasso96fix" which is included in Winuae.
This fix allows larger screen widths in Picasso96 and should be started before loadwb in startup-sequence.

Would be nice if you could report back if this works for you.  :-)

[humppa]

@Trez

If you intend to use DVI with your flatpanel, make sure to use these kernel options in your loadlin-bat:

"video=riva:640x480,flatpanel=1"

[humppa]

I know there were legal issues and they had to quit selling it but is it available anywhere?

The only place that still lists Amithlon is Software Hut.
With a lot of luck, you might also manage to pick up a copy on ebay. Unfortunately, these are the only legal sources that I know of.
Also see this thread.

[humppa]

The best I have been able to get out of the card is still 1600x1200 and no widescreen modes (if I configure 1680x1050 I just get 1280x1024 oddly enough).

How did you get 1600x1200 working? Could you please list the exact timings (pixel clock etc.) so I can try them? I already tried with the specs of my TFT to no avail.

I know my micro can output 1920x1200 just fine with its Radeon 7000, so I guess it is not because of P96 - unless something related to this has been fixed in the one that comes with OS4.

I remember that someone was suggesting that it's an issue of the kernel module which limits the maximum resolution. Maybe it was even mentioned in this thread, but I am currently to lazy search for it. ;-)

Oddly enough the DVI port on my Radeon 9550 just worked without me changing anything in the configuration.

Yep, I think the "flatpanel=1" option is only required for certain nvidia-cards.

[humppa]

I mean yes, I know the Geforce FX 5200 will work on x2, but what about the speed change on Amithlon? Is AGP x8 needed along with the Geforce FX 5200 to achieve what I need?

No, you won't notice any difference. AGP/PCI-speed is absolutely neglectable for 2D applications.