Efika + MOS 2.1 = Awesome!

[Piru]

@Sprocki
[EDIT]

Just to clarify: This is a result from EFIKA system?

[/EDIT]

Heh, it's nice to be wrong here :-D Or alternatively something is screwy with memtest. I seem to remember some very poor read performance (more like 14MB/sec read).

If this is true, I guess it might be worth looking into this, then.

[Britelite]

Piru wrote:
Just to clarify: This is a result from EFIKA system?

Getting 66MB/s write and 14MB/s read on my EFIKA, so I seriously doubt he ran it on one

[Sprocki]

Piru wrote:
@Sprocki
Just to clarify: This is a result from EFIKA system?

Sorry, no, this is from my Peg2 system. I didn't know there was such a big difference between those two as it was said both of them would have the same AGP capabilities. I therefore thought it wouldn't matter. I was wrong then.

If this is true, I guess it might be worth looking into this, then.

I cannot check for my Efi yet but your values seem to be confirmed by Britelite, so they should be correct. But well, 14MB/s is still much more than you can get by any other input (USB or - strange idea - mem cache via Ethernet), so why not opt it in in case of running out of memory? Better slow down than refuse working.

Anyway, I'm still wondering why my R7500 is so much faster than your R8500LE. Is this all due to the limitations of Efika? Then why should one buy an R9250 for that tiny board if it is that limited? Even my crappy R7500 would be enough for it.

[Piru]

@Sprocki

Anyway, I'm still wondering why my R7500 is so much faster than your R8500LE. Is this all due to the limitations of Efika?

Ehum, they're both in Peg2.

And the 8500LE is faster in pretty much anything else than reading the VMEM with CPU.

[spihunter]

Whoa, that was scary! Piru was almost wrong! :lol:

Seriously though, It would be cool to have the option to use graphic memory even if it was slow.

Say you were working on a larger type project on a Efika and you ran out of memory and couldnt continue? It would be nice to use the extra graphic memory to finish up?

I know you probably wouldnt be doing anything heavy duty on one but you never know?

[sadddam]

i've got radeon 8500le too (in peg2).
got these results:

Allocated memory at 0xe1c07000 -> 0xe7b16fff, 99680256 bytes
Writing 0x00000000... 126 MB/sec.
Verifying 0x00000000... 12 MB/sec.
Writing 0xffffffff... 128 MB/sec.
Verifying 0xffffffff... 12 MB/sec.
Memory is ok!

strange that the 7500 has twice the speed as the 8500 (even if its an le) - or this means nothing?

[hooligan]

Whoa, that was scary! Piru was almost wrong!

Didn't believe it in the first place  :lol:

[Sprocki]

spihunter wrote:
Say you were working on a larger type project on a Efika and you ran out of memory and couldnt continue? It would be nice to use the extra graphic memory to finish up?

This was my intention. Why let the double of your RAM lie about unused? It's quite bizarre to have a minboard with less memory than an addon card. Let's me think of Amiga times again when my A4000 had 18MB onboard but more stuck onto a SCSI card.
See also that for a lot of tasks you wouldn't need more bandwidth like playing MP3, delivering web pages, logging files, editing text documents, pixeling icons, playing SVN repository and many more. It would be great to even delegate certain tasks to that slow mem which will never need a bigger bandwidth.

[DamageX]

On my Efika with Radeon 9200 I got 70MB/s write, 15MB/s read.

As far as the write performance, I know it is better in a PC. With the AGP riser being plugged into a PCI slot I guess it's not a surprise that it doesn't reach the full performance level.

What do we have to take advantage of these cards at this point anyway? I haven't tried any 3D accelerated programs yet, are there any in particular that run nicely on Efika under MOS?

[pVC]

Radeon 7500 is pretty fast card.. it was made as highend card.

On my Pegasos1 I get 75MB/s write and 23MB/s read with 7500. With 9000pro and 9100 (rebadged 8500LE) I get 75MB/s write and 15MB/s read.

I also tried to make some benchmarks with couple of programs and 7500 seemed to be sligthly faster on almost everything, not slower at least. Tests were made with GLQuake, QuakeIII, CgxBenchmark and p96speed.

Also the compatibility seems to be best with 7500... like Mawi's demos work with it, but not on 9000-series cards. Some other 3D programs have some little non-serious issues with 9000-serie, but not on 7500...

[Crumb]

@Sprocki

I use a 256MB 128bit Radeon9250 and I would certainly love to be able to be able to use half of my memory as "slow ram". Even if speed is around 15MB/s reading it would be twice the speed of chipmem on normal amigas and would be much faster than the harddrive and infinitely better than running out of ram with Sputnik.

[Golem!dk]

Is more than 128MB accessible on that card?

[zylesea]

On my Efika with Radeon 7000 (Club 3D, 32 MB version) I got
write: 70 MB/s
read: 22 MB/s

[Sprocki]

Sprocki wrote:
Anyway, I'm still wondering why my R7500 is so much faster than your R8500LE. Is this all due to the limitations of Efika? Then why should one buy an R9250 for that tiny board if it is that limited? Even my crappy R7500 would be enough for it.

It is still unanswered: why should I put a better graphics card like R9250 inside the EFIKA when even an R7500 delivers enough throughput? If not more than 64MB of RAM is needed I see no reason to buy a better one.

[TheMagicM]

Sprocki:
I dunno, but I bought my 92xx based card for $15 used so that works for me :-)
....



2.1 works MUCH better than 2.0.   I havent had any crashes/lockup issues like I did w/2.0 and Sputnik or other apps.  Cool stuff :-)

[skipp604]

My Radeon has TWICE the size of RAM in Efika.. Ain't that silly.

And I still don't know how to use it as expansion RAM In fact, Efika and it's Open Firmware doesn't even recognize the upper half of the 256MB RAM on Radeon... so it's only 128MB that can be used by MOS...