Yooo!

My Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB 256-bit video card rolled in today. The card was bought off ebay. The previous owner already put on passive heatsinks on the ram chips and also an aftermarket cooler for the GPU. A few things I noticed about the aftermarket cooler is that it got in the way of the 4th ram slot on my MDD, so I took out the 4th memory chip. Upon trying to close the case, the heatsink got in the way of the 5 1/4 metal bay!! Doh! So for now I took out the cd drive and my USB hub until I can cut some of the metal 5 1/4 bay housing so the heatsink can have some clearance.

I flashed the Radeon 9800 on an older PC board that still had AGP. For some reason the normal 128KB rom did not work for the card. I tried to flash it, but then it just hung up the whole system. I backed up the rom file that came with it, and it says it was a 56KB in size... I went ahead and got the one off Mac Elite that was a "reduced rom" with the slightly higher clocked gpu/ram. Flash went fine with the reduced rom. Instead of cutting away traced I desoldered R4, R2 from the backside and R5, R6 near the AGP connector.

She booted just fine into MOS. :) Now the card is ready for when the R3xx drivers are complete.

**Turns out that the Radeon 9800 PRO cards had some cores that were stamped R360 on the GPU (R360 is the Radeon 9800 XT GPU), so a simple "soft mod" would make your card an XT. Believe it had 400+ MHz GPU clocking. I left mine back at a R350 with 378 MHz GPU clock.**

Whew! Figured id share my 2 cents. Hope this helps out someome.

Good stuff, thanks

Ok, here's the deal, I have a PowerMac 3.1 (graphite) with a Radeon 9000 64Mb (AGP) installed in it. Will a flashed 9800 card work (when the drivers be ready)? Cause I 've read some weird stuff that someone has to modify it's hardware interface in order to make the card compatible for installation into a regular PM.

Cool_amigaN,

From what I gather you should be able to use a PC version if it has a red PCB and 2 notches in the AGP interface, as it is "universal" and will fall back to AGP 2x. It would have to be flashed.

Don't confuse AGP_V1/V2 etc with AGP_x2/x4/x8 !!!

The 1st is about the voltage and yes if the card fits into the slot it should work.

x2/x4/x8 is about the speed of transfer between mobo and GFX-card and yes GFX-cards will auto-slow-down to what the mobo can handle (the Efika isn't even AGP_x1 and it still flys o.k.), The real problem is that Apple in their unchallenged wisdom decided to use some "unused" pins to route power to ADC-monitos (5V for USB if I'm not mistaken). Those pins were later used to detect AGP speed bigger than x2 ......
AFAIK this issue exist from Graphite to Quicksilver (MDD&FW800 are o.k.) and the PMac won't power on unless those pins/contacts are cut or isolated with tape.

>Ok, here's the deal, I have a PowerMac 3.1 (graphite) with a Radeon 9000 64Mb (AGP) installed in it. Will a flashed 9800 card work (when the drivers be ready)?

Yeah, it should work for your system too.
I've had a 9700Pro and a 9800XT installed in a Quicksilver and an MDD with no problems.

>(when the drivers be ready)

The current drivers work fine (they just lack 3D support).
I'm using a 9800XT right now.

[ Edited by Jim 26.09.2012 - 19:44 ]

Jim, are you sure man? Cause as kronos and Red suggested, I need to make some hardware routing by isolating specific AGP pins on the card in order to make it compatible with the Graphite. That's what I know as well. Take a look HERE.

I went the easy way and bought a proper Mac Radeon 9800XT ;)

@Cool_amigaN,

Yes, Jim has pins taped on his Radeon 9800XT to make it work in a G4 PowerMac.

I think he just meant to say that it was possible to use it in the G4 PowerMac's, not that it could be used without modifications, such as the modifications you provided the link to.

@pampers

Heh, well, the easy way is definitely the expensive way as well, a route I am currently try to avoid :P

@amigadave

O, that clears is it. Thanks :)

I'd like to know if "reduced" gfx card firmwares work correctly in 3D as according to what I understood from some Trev's comments some of these firmwares were butchered without knowing very well what was chopped.

Although OSX drivers work correctly (they seem to enable features without relying on openfirmware) MorphOS 3.x ones won't work in 3D since these expect the card init is done correctly by openfirmware (something that is sometimes broken in "reduced" firmwares, causing bad 3D on MorphOS 3.x).

Trev's webpage includes interesting information about reducing correctly mac gfx card firmwares although an automatized tool would be more comfortable.

Another question: R9800 PRO is based on R350 and R800XT on R360 (in most configurations because some later PROs were shipped with R360 as well). Does the new driver supports (3D speaking) the full range of 3xx chipset or only 300?

I really wanted to get the information like this - thank you, good stuff

> Does the new driver supports (3D speaking) the full range of 3xx chipset or only 300?

I think future tense would be more apt for this question ;-) And I strongly suspect that the driver won't support just the R300 proper but more like the R3xx family as a whole. But then, the only one who'd really know is the author.

I'd imagine the family of R3xx would be supported. As far as modifying the card, it really is simple to just desolder those resisters if they are present on your 9800 if you don't want to tape over any pins or scratch at those traces to cut off connections to pin 3 & 11, but this is your preference.

I do believe that the reduced roms might affect 3D, but so far when I tested it, MOS 2.7 worked correctly with my 9200SE in 3D but then was broke in the latest 3.1 . havent tried to replace the tinygl.library from the older one to see if that would fix things in 3.1

So far with the reduced rom on my 9800 PRO, MOS seems to like it. Will know for sure once 3D support is there. Am tempted to flash a spare 9200SE with a reduced rom to see if any of the 3D is altered with. of course trying that with 2.7 since 3.1 draws a bunch of random black/white polygons.

[ Edited by Doffo 27.09.2012 - 21:47 ]

Cool_amigaN,
Quote:

The current driver works fine for my 9800XT, so I'd assume that future revisions would work on many R3XX cards as well.

[ Edited by Jim 29.09.2012 - 21:58 ]

> The current driver works fine for my 9800XT, so I'd assume that
> future revisions would work on many R3XX cards as well.

A future 3D driver for R3xx wouldn't be a revision of the current 2D driver for R3xx, same as current 3D driver for R2xx isn't a revision of the current 2D driver for R2xx.
The combined 2D driver for R1xx/R2xx/R3xx is MOSSYS:Devs/Monitors/Radeon, while the 3D drivers are distinct for R1xx and R2xx (MOSSYS:Libs/Rave3D/r200.library and MOSSYS:Libs/TinyGL/r200.library in case of R2xx, and r100.library in case of R1xx). So I assume that 3D support for R3xx will cause a new r300.library to appear besides existing r100.library and r200.library.

Interesting Andreas.
I'd never really delved into the system, so that's news to me.

In any case, its a fair assumption that if the 2D driver supports a wide range of R3xx GPUs that the 3D driver will also.