ATi 9x00 Drivers on Amiga One

[filson]

One thing I'm not entirely shure of is why everybody says one should stay away from ATi 9x00 cards (R300 chip).
ATi themselves has links to XFree86.org as for official Linux drivers. Is it just because ppl are afraid of upgrading XFree on their Linux box or is there something I've missed?
I can't belive that Amiga wants us to run on 2 years old gfx hardware when there apparently isn't any reason to it. :-?  :-?  :-?

[poweramiga2002]

I have purchased the ATI radeon 9000 for my A1 system and would happy if it were fully supported by os4 and linux

[Elektro]

I think R300 is only found on 9500 and 9700 cards.

[olegil]

XFree 4.3 supports the chip, no problem there. The console drivers seems to work just fine with 9000, but fails miserably with 9700 (9000 DOES have R300, it's the 9200 that doesn't. For some odd reason they decided to release the next 8xxx card as 9200 or something). Considering everyone involved in the amigaone-linux project on sourceforge has pressing business elsewhere at the moment (half the people are doing OS4 drivers, and some are just too plain busy), for NOW it's better to go safe. But I can't remember having told people not to get an R300. As long as XFree 4.3 supports it, there's no reason not to use it. And I think OS4 will support it via that external library someone was doing. But I'm not entirely certain.

[filson]

Thank you very much. I suppose, without pushing the envelope, that this will include the 9800 aswell. I'd like to fit the Miggy with a R350 chip, regardless of available software for it.

just on a side note, here's a snippet from www.beyond3d.com regarding the 8500/9100/9200 confusion:
Radeon 9200 is basically a reworked Radeon 9000 chip, with added AGP8X support - similar to NVIDIA's recent refresh of the GeForce 4 chips (NV17 to NV18 and NV25 to NV28). Its positioning is a little confused, being that it has a 'higher' product number than the Radeon 9100 (the new name for Radeon 8500 R200 chips)

[Joshua]

One thing I'm not entirely shure of is why everybody says one should stay away from ATi 9x00 cards (R300 chip).

I think you might be referring to what we (Forefront) said about avoiding the newer Radeons.  We were talking in relation to AmigaOS 4 only, not Linux.

[Rob]

The SNAP drivers should allow you to use the newer Radeon and many
other cards with OS4.  Just remember SNAP is for 2D only so you might
be waiting longer for 3d support to appear on some cards than others.
The key, I think is to wait and see what is supported before buying.

[Elektro]

8500 is equal to the 9100, 9200 is even better whereas 9000 is slower from both so i find it hard to beleive that it has the R300 chip.

edit:

"We will start with RADEON 9000 Pro and RADEON 9000 chips:
Both chips are based on the sane RV250 graphics core and differ only by the working frequency. RV250 is a slightly modified R200 core (used in RADEON 8500/LE)"

I don't want to dissapoint you, but A1 supports AGP 2x cards only! Some AGP 4x cards could work on AGP 2x but R300, R350 and new nVidia are AGP 8x cards. There are physical differences from AGP 2x, 4x to 8x (one of the parameters is core voltage).

A1 needs AGP 8x (to be able to connect new graphic cards), and DDR (instead of SDR, to get decent speed out of such cards).

[Bodie]

On my former wintel box, my ATi 9000 pro ran most games very smoothly on an old agp x2 only motherboard. With some overclocking I was able to pump out just over 5000 points on 3dmark. Not bad on a 900mhz AMD machine, eh?

[Eric_Z]

@Baro2000

"From the ATI 9700pro page

"...compatible with AGP 2X (3.3v), 4X (1.5V), 8X (0.8v) or Universal AGP 3.0 bus configuration (2X/4X/8X)..."

[olegil]

@Eric_Z:

Yeah, that's probably why so many people are already running 9x00 cards on the AmigaOne, including the 9700.  :-D

[Bodie]

olegil wrote:
@Eric_Z:

Yeah, that's probably why so many people are already running 9x00 cards on the AmigaOne, including the 9700.  :-D

9700, wow  :-o . Wouldn't that be overkill  :-D .

[filson]

Thx for the replys guys.
It has now become clear to me that ... well no republic here, but that there is some disturbance in the information flow regarding gfx on AOne. I find it hard to belive that the 9x00 on R3x0 will not be supported under AOS 4. Not buying because someone who creates drivers only has a gforce card, is not optimal. 2D will do fine for me for starters. There arn't any 3D apps for AOS4 out there anyways.
And I can still use it for my PC if it comes to that. :-)
The confusion about AGP on gfx cards must come from Mobo makers that only support AGP 4+. The gfx cards never mind anything but AGP 1.

thx for your replies, everyone.

[olegil]

I was going to ask "why would 9700 be overkill", but then I saw the price. Frigging 6 times as expensive as my 7500 with 64MB DDR. Whoa.

I agree. Overkill. 7500 is _more than enough_ for me, as I would NEVER EVER call myself a "serious gamer". Ever :-)