RadeonHD V.5 driver

@PixelHi

Your RX card will offer 1080p+ video decoding. Something the Radeon HD or sam460 itself can't do.

@geennaam

Great, thank you letting me know. I think it is going to be little more future proof 🤔.

Hopefully there will be more development of drivers for RadeonRx. Why would not everyone use this instead of Radeon HD? Linux? Morphos compatibility?

@PixelHI
Quote:

Even not Linux not Morphos support RadeonHD for real in 2d and 3d :)

There are indeed no reasons to use RadeonHD anymore, if you can use RadeonRX. But sam460 and x1000 can't show uboot on it, so that can be an issue for those who have no needs for 3d and accelerated video playback. So if one can live with UBOOT not being show on x1000 and sam460, then of course the same as did most x5000 users RadeonRX is must.


I think the reasons for the continued development of RadeonHD was because of two issues :

1). There wasn't normal Warp3D/MiniGL for RadeonRX : but now there are Nova Bridge.
2). X1000 users wasn't able to use RadeonRX, and only few months ago ppls on os4welt (that was goos from amiboing if i remember well), find out that RadeonRX can be used on X1000 too.

But since both things are not true anymore, and take the fact that RadeonHD still can't play 1080 well with GPU (with our drivers at least), I think that was the more or less late versions of RadeonHD drivers. Instead, will be good to see Acube fixing uboot for sam boards, and aeon fix the CFE for x1000 to be able to shown uboot.

Of course IMHO.

Maybe also because we have :

* paid for a Radeon HD card (R7 240 - 250 - 270 - 280...) and we don't want to pay for a new card again (while these cards can THEORICALLY decode 1080p streams without any problem)

* paid for tyhe Radeon HD drivers

* paid for the Radeon HD driver v5.x hoping it would allow us to be able to play 1080p stream without any problem

* paid for Warp3D SI (and we should pay again for Nova Bridge if changing for a Radeon RX)

So no, going the RX way after having spent so much money i sa no go for many Radeon HD users.

@kas1e
Quote:
I have an X1000 and so far am staying with the RadeonHD for a couple of reasons.

1. RadeonRX is not officially supported on the X1000. Takes changing a jumper on the motherboard if I remember correctly.

2. Can't access CFE, so I can't make changes to CFE without swapping graphics cards and I don't want to be switching graphics cards.

I do have a Radeon RX550 that I bought a year or more ago hoping to put it in a A1222 but, alas, not yet.

I would put it in my X1000 if it was officially supported, even if I had to change a jumper on the motherboard.

Unfortunately I reverted back to v3.7 driver because mplayer eventually freezes when playing using v5.14 driver. I asked if anyone else has seen this but got not reply. See post #199 for details.

@kas1e

I don't mind not seeing Uboot, there us not much to do after it's working. I actually would not mind to have an option not to see it at all, I guess Rx 550 should fix that 😁.

Its like on a PC, new bios basically allows to skip all this "essential" technical data. I'm so happy I don't need to wait for memory test to be done before boot!

@K-L

I think it's a cost of improvement.

@K-L
Sorry. Driver development is costly, and we have a very limited user-base. It would be a different matter if we could spread the costs out over millions of users like AMD, nVidia & co. can.

@PixelHi
Quote:
A quick hint: make sure that UBoot is set up to use the serial port for both keyboard & display. that way you'll still be able to access UBoot via a serial cable and a terminal on another machine.

I can't remember which UBoot variables to set. It might actually do so automatically in addition to outputting to VGA, so it's worth checking ahead of time.

Hans

@Hans

BOOT_CONSOLE must to be set to "uart0" (but i guess the hardware does that automatically once that special jumper is set)
os4_commandline must be set to "serial" (and optional the debuglevel too)

Thats all i have set here and i can control the boot process from a pc with PuTTY (only those parts where it expects user input e.g. switching to a DVD boot device)
Everything else is automated and i have never had the need to change anything afterwards.

/me crossing fingers that the battery don't give out anytime soon

Again, thank you your advices. I'm thinking of getting serial cable, just for a sake to be able diagnose things, and post here.

BTW. Radeon 5450 is like $15, it's basically price of the cable, sure i need to swap graphics cards, but with a cable I need a whole laptop 😋.

@Hans
I have the solution! Just make a graphic card for AmigaOS from scratch and charge for drivers development when you sell this graphic card. Genius idea! 😁

@Raziel
I'm not sure about BOOT_CONSOLE, but os4_commandline settings won't change how the UBoot console works (it will redirect AmigaOS 4's debug console to serial, though).

From memory, there were two variables to adjust. One changed the output from VGA to serial, and the other changed input from keyboard to serial. Both the A1222 and X5000 will use serial automatically in addition to VGA & keyboard, so you don't need to do anything.

@PixelHi
Quote:

Hehe. I've seriously thought about designing my own GPU. I'd never be able to beat the big guys in raw performance, but could design something that's a lot easier to use (i.e., simple enough you could easily bit-bang it without a driver just like the old Amiga chipsets). However, I'd need a large enough niche market to make it financially viable.

Hans

@Hans

IIRC on SAM460 to use a radeonRX Uboot env to set serial:

stdout=serial
video_activate=pci

and (if not yet established)

baudrate=115200

@Hans

These are the only variables i have set and it works


The "bootargs" might be shared between linux and amigaos?

@Raziel
bootargs is for Linux only.

The variables for input and output in U-Boot are stdin, stdout and stderr, but the defaults, if not set, on the X5000 should be something like stdin=usbkbd,serial and stdout=vga,serial.
I don't know anything about CFE, but it's probably similar, i.e. by default both keyboard and serial are used for input, gfx card and serial for output.

@joerg

Yes, stdin and stdout are the UBoot variables I was talking about. I remember having to change them on my Sam460 so that it used the serial port instead of VGA and the keyboard.

Hans

@Thread

We should stay on topic instead of promoting Radeon RX cards (there must be other topics talking about these cards and how to use them on Sam460, X1000 and X5000).

Think about us, poor Radeon HD users :)

@Hans

I know that developping a driver is costly (not only with money since Linux Radeon drivers are made freely by *lots* of developpers whereas you are alone working on it for AmigaOS 4.1). Thanks for your work :)

@PixelHi

Quote:

You can turn it off on the X1000 so there is just the logo and and also tell it to start booting WB. But then you can't have a boot menu if you kept multiple volumes to chose from. Needing a null modem cable connected to another computer to pick an item off a boot menu would be annoying.

@Raziel

With a terminal attached the CFE output appears but I don't recall if it responds to input. I'm sure it would. I've done it before but don't recall if it needs redirecting first.

@Hans

Quote:

Well, it's been done before. With the ZZ9000 and Vampire SAGA. And the Vampire now has a 3d engine with Maggie above the AMMX feature. Acting like a blitter I read but AMMX was supposed to give more freedom than a blitter model so don't know why they went back to one. Also I can't decide if Maggie is named after a bird or an old Rod Stewart song but she sounds like an old chipset.

In order to be able to redirect the CFE output and input to serial you can set the two variables below. To revert, use the second variable.
A variable can be used ad a command in CFE.

setenv -p gotoserial "set console uart0"
setenv -p gotovga "set console pcconsole0"

from then on, you would just need to type "gotoserial" (without quotes) and press enter to have the output redirected to your second device e.g. Amiga, pc or Mac.

To connect your AmigaONE X1000 to a Mac, you just need a Serial to USB adapter, e.g.

a generic
USB to RS232 RS 232 Serial DB9 9 Pin COM or a branded LogiLink USB 2.0, RS232, AU0034 they are listed on Ebay and amazon

and you can use the terminal and type the following command:

screen /dev/cu.usbserial-DN027LVL 115200 for the no-name using DN chipset

or

screen /dev/cu.usbserial-143320 115200 for the logilink