Radeon HD 6850 in my X1000

**UPDATE** The problem outlined below has been overcome by updating the X1000 firmware to the latest version, as suggested by Hans and Trevor on the Hyperion support forum. Now the 9850 card is working in my computer. I'll post some observations on the setup here tomorrow.

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Hey, folks. I just posted mostly the same text on the Hyperion support forum. But I'll ask here too because Amigans always brings good answers with little "trouble." Heh.

I've tried a couple of HD 6850 cards in my new X1000 and I have not been met with success. The latest card (tried just now) happens to be the very same single-slot PowerColor Radeon HD6850 used by Trevor and remarked on in his blog entry. Since that's a card known to work, I'm certain I must be doing something wrong.

Sympton: After the bootup menu screen the red bard begins its advance across the bottom of the X1000 logo screen. When the red bar reaches the end at the right, everything stops. The AmigaOS 4.1 logo screen never appears.

This is the same with and without additional graphics cards installed. It's true too with only the 6850 installed. I am using the new .49 release of the Radeon driver, and in devs/monitors I have Radeon HD 6 just as detailed by Trevor.

Have I missed something obvious?

As an aside, I've also tried a HD 5770 card and that worked perfectly. In fact, moments ago I uploaded tge GfxBench2D benchmark results to Hans' site.

Glad to see you have a superb Amiga gfx, looking forward to hear your 2D impressions as well as 3D as soon as it gets done

It was getting late into the evening when I got the Radeon HD 6850 card working in my X1000, so I didn't spend too much time testing it -- but initial impressions are highly favorable. Workbench operations seemed quite snappy, even more so than before.

It's funny, on my Sam440 machines I thought that sort of thing was quite acceptable, then got the X1000 with the 4850 card fitted and suddenly the Sam440s seemed pokey by comparison. (That's no bash -- I love my little Sam440ep-mini especially and am keeping it!) Then, after only a few days, I got used to the X1000/RadeonHD4850 speed I guess -- because suddenly, zing, it seems fast all over again with the new 6850 card. I better not get too used to this boost, however -- because I'm out of Amiga hardware upgrade money! (Need to save some for software, like the Hollywood upgrade.)

I did play a couple of minutes of video and can remark that playback of standard-def video is super smooth -- even in full frame without any overlay support (or its modern equivalent). I will see what happens with 720p video tonight, though I expect some trouble there. But we shall see. The composting demo Hans did with the boing ball in the 3D room is just amazingly smooth. I was mesmerized for long minutes, just flipping that room around with the cursor keys while the animated ball and the sound effects never missed a beat.

Running Blender with wazp on the 6850 card is acceptable, though particles do not show in the wireframe animation previews they way they do when using the normal warp3d.library and with my old 9250 PCI card installed in the X1000. (It's not in the machine now, as I put the ethernet card back in.) My big Blender test -- loading a large Klingon battlecruiser blend file and rotating the complex mesh -- remains frustratingly slow in Blender on AmigaOS no matter how it's run. One day, one day...

Meantime, I submitted the GfxBench2d benchmark data for my 9850 card to Hans' site. I got a score of 5,870.75. Pretty good?

I wonder what this firmware upgrade did...