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Mobility Radeon 9000 thread


hardboiledwonderland
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This is meant as a consolidated thread for all things Mobility Radeon 9000-related (devid 4c66, sometimes 5835). As one of the most poorly-supported chips in Intel OS X land I figured it would be less frustrating for 9000 users to be able to get all their info in one place instead of hanging onto various Radeon 7500, Inspiron, and ThinkPad threads.

So lets start with what we do know (all info in this post pertains to 10.4.8 JaS release):

 

Out of the box no OpenGL acceleration, no Quartz Extreme, and no Core Image (while QE should be possible, CI will never work). Locked at 1024x768.

 

Callisto allows use of native screen resolution (for my ThinkPad T40 that is 1400x1050. I know that is also true for some Inspiron 8600's).

 

AGPGart 2.1 successfully enables AGP bus over PCI bus, giving a slight performance benefit.

 

Disabling beamsync makes the interface substantially quicker and more responsive.

 

What we don't know (again, JaS 10.4.8. Feel free to comment about versions, but this is all I'm qualified to comment on):

 

Can we get hardware OpenGL working? Though QE is required for DVD.app and for Quicktime acceleration, OpenGL allows DVD and video-viewing at full speed within MPlayer.

 

Will Quartz Extreme work? More 'low end' chips like the 7500 have it, but the 9000 seems to be mated to the crappy ATIRadeon8500.kext. While QE support would make most 9000-based machines 'true Macs' for most practical purposes, the importance of QE for 'typical' laptop use (web, email, word processing, music-listening, occasional video-viewing) is largely countered by OpenGL support and other 'speed fixes'.

 

Please contribute any and all information/experiences/advice you may have regarding the Radeon Mobility 9000 and Intel OS X. I will continuously update this first post with useful information posted in this thread.

Edited by hardboiledwonderland
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Well Hardboiledwonderland, I also have a Mobility Radeon 9000 in my Dell Inspiron 600m and I got OpenGL to work at decent frame rates with Katana 3a4, I can veiw Visualations in iTunes 7 that work (they don't skip! :) I also want QE on 9000 but When i Try to use VLC for DVDS, i only get sound but no picture

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Great... I'm going to edit the first post to reflect your testing.

 

Also, where can we get Katana .3a4? Katana .3x has been pulled from this thread: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=35345 only the .2 versions are available right now. My understanding is that Katana is a convenience tool to make installation of AGPGart/Callisto/etc easier (and doing it intelligently based on GPU auto-detect)... do we know which files and which versions Katana is changing for the 9000?

Edited by hardboiledwonderland
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Couple of notes:

-If you're posting with regards to what works and what doesn't, include your devid. Not all the cards are the same. Most of you are using 4c66, mine is a 5835

-You'll never get CI on this card, only QE. This has been covered numerous times. Due to hardware limitations you need >9550 for CI.

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nope, I'm on software OpenGL, which is like molasses. But I haven't tried agpart for a while. I'm at uni and haven't had time to try the newer versions of agpart. Back in July 2 of us with identical cards were working with joblo to try and get agpart to work on ATI motherboards. I managed to get my card to report as AGP, but I couldn't load it with the 8500 apple drivers w/o a panic. There wasn't any improvement with the bus reported as AGP. I'll mess around with katana/agpart in the next couple weeks when i get back home to unfiltered and unmetered internet, and don't mind trashing my system. If you want to play videos/movies, I've found that the new version of quicktime 7.1.3 is actually pretty decent--better than mplayer or vlc. It plays full speed, though it slows up periodically. This can be fixed by hitting spacebar twice (pause/resume). But it's usable. However, I believe the 4c66 card may be slightly better supported. My 5835 is a bit of an oddball card. If someone has gotten some better opengl speed that's quite a relief. Still, I'm a bit saddened by the fact that 7500 people now have QE. There's no reason why the 9000 shouldn't too. All that's keeping me booting into windows now is for mic support (ATI AC97 doesn't have it implemented), and for better video file support.

 

Also, for those of you messing around with agpart: It might be beneficial to remove callisto while you're doing that until you get agpart working. Add stuff one at a time, and also callisto writes a lot of stuff to the system.log buffer, and will probably keep you from reading the agpart/ati driver stuff from the system log.

 

If someone wants to try stuff, try using the other community ATI driver ATI.kext (JAS's maybe?). It's pretty old, but it's around here somewhere, and someone posted something about getting stuff working with the 9000 by using that instead of the 8500.kext. From what Joblo was saying back in july, the main problem is that 8500 kext being {censored}.

 

the only things that I can see katana helping out with is setting the IOFramebuffer to CallistoFB, and installing agpart. I don't think callisto by itself would change anything.

Edited by mickles
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Thanks for the exhaustive feedback, Mickles. I know how hard it can be to tinker for tech stuff while at the university. I just finished grad school in December and didn't both with OSX86 until after that. One reason I'm doing this thread is to try to have a centralized resource for information about the 9000 since there seems to be SO MUCH bad info floating around, unverified claims of this and that (and confusions over nomenclature). Seems some people claim their 9000's are working perfectly simply because iChat runs.

 

I was surprised and thankful when all my audio, including mic's, worked out of the box for me. Skype works great here. Just the video acceleration is holding me back, but I am using this as my primary machine at the moment. Whatever, I just pretend its a PowerBook G3 or an original TiBook.

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First hi to all of you, guys!

 

I want to say a couple of things. I don't have mobility 9000, but we have the same problem (all users who must use ati8500 drivers).

I tried almost everything, unfortunatelly without result. The maximum I can get you will find in my signature.

I have one extra problem, AGPgart does not work for Intel chip set.

 

I'm not an optimist, for a couple of reasons:

1. We cannot expect that Apple will fix crappy driver, because new Macs will never have Ati 9xxx card

2. Many good people who are (maybe!) able to patch this does not have this card, and they are not interested to invest time for something which belongs to the past (yes, ati 9xxx is old card)

3. If you want to invest a little, you can buy a graphic card which can work (AGP x1600, for example).

 

So, if there is a solution, it wil be almost universal for every 9xxx users, and that's the reason for my reply here.

I want to help, if someone can make the right direction.

 

The most helpfull posts related to our problem are from Goodtime (in this forum).

Thanks, Goodtime!

 

My device id is 5960.

 

p.s. Sorry for my "far away from perfect" English.

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I agree that writing a OpenGL driver for the card is probably out of the scope of those who have a 9xxx (certain is for me!). Ultimately its only really an issue for those of us with old (but perfectly capable) IBM and Dell laptops kicking around with that chip in it. No modern laptops have that chip and any desktop new or old with that card could be upgraded at a modest cost. A driver for the 9xxx would be for a pretty specialized crowd, so probably not worth it to those who could write one.

 

Oh well. I'm in the market for a new computer anyways, but probably a big 'desktop replacement' 17"er. I was hoping to continue using this as my 'mobile' machine.

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