Upgrade X1000 to RX560 or not?

All,
I have an RX560 graphics card that I'm bought to upgrade my X1000 which is currently running an HD7750. I know I'll need to change something on the motherboard and that I'll loose soft reboot, which might be OK, but I'm concerned about doing so, because when I use version 5.14 of the RadeonHD.chip driver I experience instability of my system with random crashes.For that reason I've gone back to useing version 3.7, which is very solid.

So, I'd like to hear from other X1000 owners who have upgraded to the RadeoRX.chip and are using an RX card in your machine.

Is your machine stable?
Can you play 1080p and higher resolution videos without problems?
Which player do you tend to use, Emotion or DVPlayer?
I know MPlayer won't get any speed up, but does it adversly affect MPlayer in any way?

Any ohter issues I should be concerned about if I decide to upgrade?

Thanks in advance for any inputs. I'd really like to hear from X1000 owners specifically about your experiences.

@ktadd

It's as solid as it was with a HD card.
I'd say your unstableness stems from something else


Can't say anything about hd videos as I don't wach them

Emotion playback:

X1000 + RX550
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa4sE2DcUdg

X1000 + R750X
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHowHS3hnWA

Frank is using his X1000 with the RX550 and it works fine.
I would miss the warm start of AmigaOS, so i currently use my RadeonHD 7750 (with the older driver, because warm start is missing in newer drivers?).

But Frank reported no problems with this RX card to me.

I upgraded to RX on my X1000. You get used to the no soft reboot.
Stability is no different. Performance is better, particularly with video decoding.
An X1000 CFE update is needed to officially support RX cards.

@imagodespiraQuote:

These two videos are a little bit confusing for video performance comparison.
Both RX and R7 should play video with with hw acceleration - UVD/VAAPI. But video with R7 has no active hw acceleration, it has software decoding only.

I have X1000 with HD7970 and hardware accelerated Emotion works fine here. But I have to say, while you can use RX+UVD with Enhancer only, for HD ( and R7/R9 ) you need Enhancer plus new RadeonHD v.5.

But overall, I agree than RX card are more powerful than HD/R7/R9.

@sailor

You're right, the new V5 driver came with acceleration, right? I didn't consider it.

But if i remember right, it was very slow? I could be wrong.

EDIT:
Just flew over:

https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/ ... &order=ASC&status=&mode=0

It seems that V5 and RadeonHD7750 on X1000 only gets 720p video, same as my X1000 without acceleration. Maybe an user can prove it.


So it depends on your needs:

no warm start -> for me a problem

- But some FPS in this thread shows a better performance with the newer driver.
- Power Management works, a nice feature.
- And maybe much less CPU usage with 720p (would be enough for me).

@imagodespira

yes, you are right.

X1000 can normally play 720p with sw decoding, depending on codec with 70-100% CPU utilization.
X1000 + Radeon v.5 + UVD hw decoding plays 720p with cca 10% CPU utilization.

And majority of FullHD (1080p) is unplayable even with UVD. Only few videos are OK - sorry, I am not remember the codecs.

@sailor

I think for most people would be 720p ok. It would be nice if the card would support more but 10% are much better than 70% ;)

@all

Thanks for the feedback. Since others don't seem to have stability problems with Radeon.chip v5 on their X1000's, I'm thinking I should probably see if I can identify the cause for that first.

I suspect maybe it's a setting I'm using GUI Preferences. Maybe in the, Options, Effects or Controls sections.

I did try changing the INTERUPTS setting in the monitor icon file but still incurred the crashes. My BOARDNAME tooltype is set to Radeon RV730. I assume that 's correct for an ATI RadeonHD 7750 graphics card?

I don't use Candy or the screen blankers, so I can eliminate those as the cause.
I do run LimpidClock. Has anyone seen issue with that program?
Guess I could start by eliminating all things in Workbench Startup.

Any other ideas on what might be causing the instability?

I havent used limpidclock in a long time, however when I did - got lockups.

@thread

I got rid of my R7 250 Southern Island card in my X1000 even though I wanted to keep it for way longer.

And it was the best decision I made since I replaced it with a RX 560.

Let's be honest : except for supporting Hans' marvellous work on Radeon drivers, forget about using Radeon HD Driver 5.x with Southern Islands cards : it will not allow you to play any MP4 (x264) video above 720p (and even most of those ones will stutter).

The only enhancement versus the 3.x version is that instead of using 95% CPU, you will be using 10-15% of it when playing a 720p video (granted it will not stutter, which will be the case with some heavily compressed ones).

And you will lose warm reboot.

With an RX560 (ok, a little hack is needed to make it work on X1000 but it's worth the hassle), I can finally play 4k x264 videos on my X1000! I have lost the warm reboot but never mind.

I also need to use a little hack to get rid of some weird freezes but it causes some tearing sometimes (know bug wich is should be fixed in the next version of the driver).

So if you want to experience the best of your X1000, go for a RX 560 (forget about the RX 580, most of them won't display anything).

I sure appreciate the RX580 move I made from HD7750 on my X5K. Took me ages before taking that leap but I did it and happier for the move.

TJ

Thanks for all the inputs.
I wrote a script to be able to easily change between RadeonHD.chip v3.7 and 5.14. It also enables and disables the "VA/RadeonHD_drv_video.library". I did this to make it easy to switch back and forth to aid in troubleshooting the v5.14 instablility problems I had experienced in the past.

So, I've been running v5.14 and I haven't experienced any instability issues this time. I must of disabled what ever was causing the issue sometime in the past.

Now, I have to decide if I want to upgrade to use the RX560 card. After looking into it closer,. I have concerns about losing the ability to access the boot menu. I do have an emergency system partition setup to be able to boot from if something goes wrong with my main partition. I also have a boot system that is setup with a vanilla, unchanged, version of AmigaOS4 Final Update2 for troubleshooting software issues. Not sure I want to lose that capability.

I know I could setup a serial cable and control booting from that, but I don't really have anything setup with a terminal to run it too. I suppose I could use my laptop or maby my android tablet or phone, with some kind of adapter, but I have no idea what that process looks like. Is there a video somewhere that shows someone booting over a serial port setup? What cable and adapter would I need?

@ktadd
Not sure if that's possible on the X1000 as well since I don't know anything about it's CFE firmware, but on U-Boot systems you can set the U-Boot variables to first try booting from an USB stick. If no bootable USB stick is inserted it will still boot from the HD.

That way you can have an emergency boot system (on the USB stick) without requiring a serial terminal to change boot options if something goes wrong with your HD boot partition.

@joerg
@ktadd

CFE uses it's own BOOT_x_COMMAND env-var for that.

Though it will always stop when the boot source is not found (would be nice if it would try the following sources instead)

@Thread

Here is what we can do with an AmigaOne X1000 and a Radeon RX560 :

Playing Heretic II (Hyperion - Amiga version from 1988 with audio music) :

https://video.amiga-ng.org/w/8ZDs4T1mvapgJCdJTu42We

No cinematics (resolution not supported?)

Playing a full HD video (1080p) or a heavy compressed 720p video with Emotion (notice the CPU usage for the second video than even 2,7Ghz PowerMac can't read with MorphOS) :

https://video.amiga-ng.org/w/7Vy9jzoX4f98NRgTrsKix7

Playing a YouTube video (Odyssey + aisotream + Emotion) from Invidious (website allowing you to watch YT videos without ads and way lighter than the official one) :

https://video.amiga-ng.org/w/8ttgPzHZgGRsPo6G6ig6x2

Sorry for the "humming sound" in the background, my video capture is not the best of the best unfortunately :(

Thanks @ K-L. Just to confirm an RX550 also delivers this same performance.