Question about ATI Radeon 9250 AGP graphics card

Hello Amigans.

Should AGP graphics cards work in an AmigaOne XE? I was under the impression that yes, this is the case, so I bought myself an ATI Radeon 9250 AGP graphics card. But I get only a blank screen when I turn the system on.

I am very interested to know if anyone else is running an AGP based graphics card and if so, what type it is!

I have been trying to find something (anything!) that will allow me to do some basic OpenGL programming, but on this old AmigaOne XE it is pretty difficult. Any suggestions would be welcome!

@Hitman

I have a Radeon 9250 running in my A1-XE G4. It has 256 MB. I think only versions 1 & 2 of the AGP standard work in the A1 AGP slot. Maybe yours is a later version?

I think the 9250 is the most common card in use in A1's.

Paul

@Hitman

Radeon 9250 graphic cards were one of the most popular cards to use with the AmigaOne XE. I sucessfully used one made by AMD, however the first one I tried was made for CompUSA and it did not display anything but a black screen. Apparently not all 9250's have identical specs. I would try to find one manufactured by AMD

Try switching it on and leaving it for a while. I believe what happens during boot up is the card does some PCI initisation. Some cards take a while to initialise.

Many years back I bought a Radeon 9250 256MB for my A1XE. Installed it, booted, got nothing but a blank screen.

Oh well, I thought, sitting there sadly...

But after about 30 seconds or so, uBoot came up and the machine booted.

So it takes a while to boot, but it does work.

Thanks for the idea @daveyw. I tried it, but no luck.

In the meantime though, I found the old Voodoo-3 that came with the system (I got it second hand from a friend and thought that I had thrown the Voodoo-3 away). The Voodoo-3 is AGP and it works, so that proves that yes, you can use AGP on the AmigaOne. I might look into the AGP version mentioned by @Paul. It is also possible that the card I bought is simply broken. It was only €19 so no big loss - I might try another one.

Can anyone tell me if the 9250 supports Warp3D and/or Open GL? I was under the impression that it does but I saw it mentioned somewhere recently that it doesn't...

Trying to get some sort of 3D acceleration going for an old AmigaOne XE is almost impossible it seems. :-/

@Hitman

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The 9250, 9200, 9000, 9000 pro and Voodoo3 are all supported by OS4. The 9000 pro is the most powerful of those cards but they are harder to come by and the memory is usually limited to 64MB although 128MB versions exist. Some 9200 and I believed 9250 cards only have a 64-bit memory interface which halves bandwidth compared to a card with a 128-bit interface.

You probably read that the 9250 isn't supported by OS3.x but that doesn't matter on the A1.

As above, the Voodoo 3 will run Warp3D software albeit at a slower pace than the Radeon cards and IIRC it doesn't do compositing which features in OS4.1 onwards. IIRC all of Amiboing's games use compositing.

The latest version of MiniGL can be found here.

Regarding graphics on these machines. I usually run it with the 9200 AGP, only half of the VRAM (128MB) is set up by the driver. I do have a PCI based 9200 also with same capacity, on that one all memory is set up. I wonder if swapping the BIOS onto the AGP one would solve the issue, given it's compatible with the timings etc. Definitely something to try.

Also, I do have a 9100 AGP 2x card, and the drivers seems to partially support it. Desktop is seen fine, however anything rendered is garbage on screen. Like the work was started and not completed.
These cards should supply twice the FPS if only supported ...

@monomango

I heard some cards have the memory configures as either 1 bank of 256MB or 2 banks of 128MB. OS4 versions prior to 4.1 displayed the full 256MB was available on all cards.

It turned out there was a bug that caused the system to crash if the upper 128MB was accessed by the OS. Rather than fix it they simply disabled the second bank, probably on the assumption that not many people would try to open a ton of screens open with compositing enabled on all of them.

In all the years I used 4.1 on my XE I never found myself in a low video RAM situation so I'd say it isn't worth potentially bricking the AGP card chasing after memory you're probably never likely to use.

If you have a 33Mhz slot free you could use the PCI card as second display.

@Rob

Thanks for the insights. Interesting, I see.

Hopefully there is no problem flashing it back, I have flashed cards quite a bit before (converting PC AGP cards to PPC Mac firmware, and PC PCI-E cards to give boot-screen on Intel Macs). Well, first at least I will only do it if they use similar memory etc.

I would like to use it for programming, so having the full memory available would be nice.. I did not know I could have two graphics cards for two displays, that's nice.

Too bad the bug was not fixed instead.. maybe too complex and time-consuming to track down.

I use sound, ethernet and IDE controller in my PCI slots.. so no slot to spare. Though it seems rock stable like that, avoiding the DMA issues.. and the freeze and dropouts that would come from using ethernet with the onboard 3com.

Does your XE have the DMA fix ? The layout for the SE is a bit different, so the Eyetech paper on it cannot be followed directly. I think I will just leave it as it is.
Applying the fix will apparently make it impossible to use a Radeon card in the 66Mhz slot also.

@monomango

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The onboard ethernet should work fine if you only enable DMA for the PCI IDE card. Did you have problems that weren't present with the XE?

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I never had any fixes applied and worked around the bugs with PCI IDE and USB hubs.

Have you tried bench marking the AGP Radeon card vs the PCI Radeon in the 66Mhz slot.

@Rob

I have not even loaded the a1ide.device driver in kicklayout. And the onboard IDE is deactivated in U-boot. Still, the onboard ethernet would be unstable, lead to a freeze or dropout from the net, then unplugging and plugging it back in would resolve it.
Maybe if I had at activated in u-boot and set to the PIO mode it would work like you described. However, complete deactivation should be the same.

Is your USB usable that way ? For me, USB file transfer leads to unresponsiveness, suddenly stops in the middle of a transfer. Sometimes freeze or reboot iirc.
How is your system behaving if not using a USB hub ? I suppose that has to do with the lack of pull-down resistors.

As for benchmarking, I quickly checked only the frame rate of the demo map in Q3. It seems about the same, as I think the limiting factor is the CPU speed, the frame-rate seems CPU bound. Overclocking the CPU to 667MHz (~10%) also gives about 10% increased frame rate.

@monomango
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If the onboard IDE is switched off in Uboot it shouldn't have any bearing on the ethernet. I think the might have been newer revision of the Articia S in the XE so perhaps that partially fixed things.

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The only problem I had is that if you unplugged a USB device then plugged it back in the system wouldn't detect it again unless you used a different port. A powered USB hub resolves that dropout.

@Rob

Right. I suppose it’s about chip revision. The VIA chip is A and not B model. That’s where the USB controller is too. XE uses B.
I think mine was a very early SE board. As you mention, ArticiaS revision can also influence this.

As for your USB plugging issue, it is resolved by adding those pull-down resistors, described on the Eyetech doc. Pretty easy fix.

I think I can have stable USB by using the NEC card, if i disable EHCI.. Disabling the high-speed mode.

However, it dosen’t have any free slots left. Only if I found a stable way to use onboard Ethernet, don’t wanna sacrifice sound or UDMA-6 mode IDE..