smartie77 Posted August 21, 2010 Share Posted August 21, 2010 Questions and Answers for Mobility HD4xxx users Why I am doing this ? Well .. I am tired of telling everybody the same.. Send all those mobility users directly to the ATI framebuffer section as written below. Problem You have a Laptop with a internal pci express Ati Radeon HD4xxx series card, with vram ranging from 128 to 1024MB. OSX will only boot in safemode and only in 1024x768 or 800x600 whichever is your displays native resolution. Why ? OSX tries to load AtiRadeonX2000.kext ( and ATI4x00controller.kext in SL )and all its bundles because your vendors ID and pci id is in the kext. But nevertheless Your ATI Card can not find a display with Radeon kexts loaded. That is because the ATI X2000 kexts in OSX are NOT for Laptops. They are for the iMac 9,1 and iMac 10,1 which uses a mobility 4xxx card and therefore it happens that your IDs are all in the kexts plist. BUT the iMac has no Laptop-LVDS system, it uses a different technic to get the picture to the display.Standard Laptops Displays not work with Apples drivers and therefore this kexts dont work for you. Will a Natit/ATY_Init/Enabler help ? NO and you MUST remove them for the solution to work.I tried them all , tweaked and edited them all with no success. They force the Kexts to use specific framebuffers ( Peregrine,Motmot and Shrike are the closest candidates for my Toshibas 4650 ), but the framebuffers all seem to lack LVDS output. In plain words : Wasted time. RadeonHD.kext is also incomaptible with any graphic enablers! So what now , booting in safemode is no option : First and most important : YOU DONT get Quartz Extreme / OpenGL / 3D /CoreImage. Stop crying. It wont happen with Atis kexts. Nex time buy a Laptop with a supported card. This only works with accelerated drivers which is the AtiRadeonX2000.kext in our case. Because we can not use it, we are simply left on a OSX installation with no graphical capabilites. Software mode opengl will work,videoplayback will work fine but avoid everything graphic intense or 3d. How to get correct resolution and SOFTWARE-GL * with OSX and ATI mobility: Remove any Graphics Enabler ( Natit,ATY_Init ), edit the Line "GraphicsEnabler=Yes" to "No" or remove it completely from your boot.plist if you have such a line ( If you use "myhack Installer for example ) . Remove ALL ATI*.kexts and bundles from System/Library/Extensions. Assure you have no other graphic enablers in /Extra/Extensions. Head over to the X-labs section in this forum, Ati framebuffer made by user "dong" - the kext you need is named "RadeonHD.kext" - the following link has it inside http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=190586 Notice that there are two versions, a Leopard 10.5.x one and a SnowLeopard 10.6.x one. You should download the latest ones from the dropbox links in dongs thread. Read the howto, and ask further questions there, not here. If you happen to have a corrupted mousecursor or want experiment with basic power settings of your card then edit the plist.info inside the kext; Info is there. This Driver will allow you in normal boot ( no safemode is needed ) all available resolutions at full colour without any of Apples own graphic kexts being loaded. Tweaking the graphics for a bit more performance : Use OSX86Tools http://code.google.com/p/osx86tools/downlo...ols_1.0.150.zip or a similar app to turn on "QUARTZGL". This is possible with the kext and speeds up software gl mode but results in more cpu usage ( all effects are done by the cpu and not the gpu in this mode ) . You can see in Apple System Profiler under display section if QuartzGL is on or not . RadeonHD and software compatibility ( to give you an impression on performance ). ilife 06 Imovie/Iphoto/iweb/Garageband : perfect. Even imovies Effects and iphotos retouching work as advertised without any hacks. Ilife 06 is fully supported and compatible with QuickTime 7.6.x in Leo. iDVD wont launch beause of the blocked Apple DVD player, which is a video issue. read below. ilife 08 / 09 : No.requires QE/CI. iwork 06 : 99% chance it works, will try it later once I get a copy. iwork 08 pages and keynote can be used with patched plists to not use QE for the UI in the apps defaults plists , see here http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=181895 . However "Numbers 08" wont run. Replacement : MS Excel 04. or Calc from Openoffice/NeoOffice. OpenOffice/ NeoOffice : works, seems to not make use of any gpu acceleration.. iwork 09 : No. same reason as ilife 08/09 : QE necessary Microsoft Office Mac 2004 works. I dont have later editions to try, theres a chance the 2008 edition will work too because it supports Tiger ( Tiger runs on old g3 imacs which have no QE/CI ) . Adobe Photoshop CS2/CS3 runs in all its glory. Unbelievable but really works nice. just make sure to not activate any checkboxes in Photoshops preferences that read some sort of enhanced gpu usage . By default it will not enable these so it runs out of the Box with RadeonHD.kext fine. Adobe Flash Player in Safari : Use the flash player that OSX installs, dont upgrade via Adobes website to version 10.1. Version 10.0 runs fine in Software mode, 10.1 seems to need QE. If you have accidently installed 10.1, you need to download adobes flash Uninstaller and reinstall some revision before 10.1. Flip4Mac // WMV components for QuickTime : wmv playing in Quicktime 7.x is working fine, however the Installer will force you to install Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin which works slow. Only MSN / Microsoft based websites make usage of this plugin which is aimed as being a concurrent to Adobes flash.. You can safely browse the web without this {censored} for youtube and other videoportals that not dance to Microsofts pipe. Uninstall is recommended. Perian Quicktime Plugin : Fine. Playback of Flash Videos in Quicktime works as advertised. SL-users : use QT7, not QTX. QuickLook and most 3rd party plugins works at good speed ( depending on cpu speed) for pictures , pdfs and video (playback works ) , even full screen toggle in 10.5.8 . Plugins so far did not harm the capability. Finders CoverFlow feature works reasonable well. Improve the speed by keeping the coverflow area in the finder to be not so big. Dashboard and Widgets works fine. itunes up until 9.x works perfectly, just coverflow there ( unlike in Finder ) is inoperable. Itunes 8.x will print a big fat warning that Coverflow is not available, while version 9.2 says nothign but just lets the coverflow area empty. QuickTime X in SnowLeo dont use this. It works but its so slow. Install QuickTime 7.6.x player for Snow from Apples download section: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL923 After Installation you'll find it in the "Utilities" folder. You can recognize it by the old Icon (blue aquaish Q) It does not replace QTX. Play all your movies and perian empowered clips with the 7.x player and not the newer one. Way faster and smoother. Apple DVD Player No. Gives a error message that I have not the correct videocard. Requires QE/CI. -> Alternative : "VLC" can playback DVDs ( and an astonishing amount of video files in general ) without.Get it here http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html Apples PhotoBooth for me not working, even though my UVC built in webcams light goes on. Pretty sure it requires QE/CI .. In 10.5.x OSX tells me that my videocard is not supported. The cam is unusable also in ichat and crashes ichat as soon as I click on the video button. Needs to be checked if this happens with other radeonhd.kext users too. Alternative for webcaming without QE/CI : macam http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/ and a supported USB cam ( read the list on the website ). The Laptops cam is unsupported in my case, so I am left to external ones : For me a very old Logitech QuickCam Express and a Creative Webcam both work with macam. OSX Time Machine Interface uses a 3d interface, this is not available. It falls back to 2d mode, leaving some black artefacts while TM is running. Time Machine opens a finder window that contains the backup files , which overlaps the Finder window with the current files. Extremely hard to navigate that way. Nevertheless it works. I strongly recommend all RadeonHD.kext users to use OSX 10.5.8 and not any kind of 10.6.x, Leopard works way better with the limitations we have to face. For example preview.app and grab.app - everyday apps in OSX - are working fine which is no longer true in 10.6.x- SnowLeo uses 3d accel modes systemwide and we simply dont have it working.Thats also why QT7 is working better over QTX . Apple simply asumes all Computers that have SnowLeo on them are high end graphics machines. Therefore QE/CI/ is turned on in the OS for many parts and all the newer apps and thus it is a no go for us RadeonHD users. Read this statement of Apple if you dont believe it : "If you use Mac OS X v10.6, your Mac already meets the requirements for Quartz Extreme and Core Image graphics." (from http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1582 ) Also Applications being developed especially for 10.6 will high likely make use of QE/CI - Apples own software armada of ilife and iwork is the best example for this to be true and sooner or later OpenCL ( even more GPU acceleration, already built into OSX SL .) Simply stay away from SL as long as possible with the current kext situation. We have corect resolution. We have video and flash playback - QuickLook - Coverflow. We can use older Apple Software from the Panther/Tiger days , even Photoshop. But that's about it with the drivers capabilities for now - thanks to "dong" . if you need /want to to run 10.6.x I would suggest to get a 3rd party pictureviewer, a 3rd party screenshooter,the 7.6.6 Quicktime Player, older ilife apps and so on. In Leo 10.5.x you can use all OSX apps and dont need a replacement, except PhotoBooth like written above.. THIS IS NOT A DISCUSSION THREAD. I may add apps/workarounds and issues. Note : SystemProfiler will show the cards vram with 256MB when using radeonhd.kext . This is cosmetics. Usable to OSX are only 16MB effectively on most cards. Thats why keynote08 keeps saying you have not enough Vram for playback.. ( ATI ATOMBIOS reports vesa 3.0 vram on boot up , this is the amount OSX can use with it) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theakseffect Posted September 12, 2010 Share Posted September 12, 2010 I know the TS post said for Radeon 4xxx, but I tried it on my laptop with ATI Radeon 5650 mobility anyway and can confirm it does NOT work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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