ATI X1900 XT Underclocked

[m3henn04]

i tired using the graphicaccelerator program on my macpro 2.66ghz with a x1900xt and couldnt get the rom dump to work which makes the whole program useless unless I am doing something wrong.

 

[m3henn04]

Another question... How come when I play RTCW in OSX i can barely maintain 125FPS but if I play the same game with the same configs running under Win XP Pro i can get 333FPS and maintain it? It will even spike up to 500+FPS under Win XP.

This maybe evident that it is Apple who has the card underclocked and not ATI when it comes shipped. Or is OSX just that much more intensive on a video card.

 

[miniConvert]

Now I have no idea about this, but is it possible the game in Windows uses DirectX where as on OS X it's having to use OpenGL?

 

[Sesshi]

It may partly be that but it's also that the clocking is driver-based and the ATI drivers under Windows will be standard and therefore will be 'uncrippled'. The OS X drivers will be 'crippled' for noise vs thermal managment more than anything else I suspect. I spent about 30 minutes looking at a taken-down Mac Pro and the thing has to have about half the effective nominal airflow through it than my Precision 690 (which is, like the Mac Pro, just another 5000X based PC). Everything is for silence of course and at peak load I can definitely hear all the fans ramping up on my Dell, whereas it all stays pretty quiet on a Mac Pro.

 

[[G5]Hydra]

It may partly be that but it's also that the clocking is driver-based and the ATI drivers under Windows will be standard and therefore will be 'uncrippled'. The OS X drivers will be 'crippled' for noise vs thermal managment more than anything else I suspect. I spent about 30 minutes looking at a taken-down Mac Pro and the thing has to have about half the effective nominal airflow through it than my Precision 690 (which is, like the Mac Pro, just another 5000X based PC). Everything is for silence of course and at peak load I can definitely hear all the fans ramping up on my Dell, whereas it all stays pretty quiet on a Mac Pro.

No, the clock is low under Windows as well. Most people first noticed the undeclocked nature of the card under XP.

-Jerry C.

 

[alien2108]

I can confirm you can sucessfully change clocks in rom dump of X1900XT. Look at strangedogs forum! I did it trying to make PC version of X1900XT/256Mb to work with EFI MacPro X1900XT rom dump and played with clocks...

 

[thagomizer]

Graphiccelerator 1.3.2 which supports x1900xt was just released.

http://thomas.perrier.name/graphiccelerator.html

Has anyone here tried it yet?

Apparently the dumping & flashing utils it comes with are not Intel Mac compatible, so you'll need Windows utils to do the dumping and flashing. Graphiccelerator just makes the appropriate mods to the ROM image.

 

[knome]

i'm just going to wait until ATIccelerator is compatible with it, so much easier finding the limit of the card and its easy to undo if you overclock the memory too high and screw over the machine permanently.

 

[m3henn04]

You can overclock the card when running XP using the ATI Catalyst program but I havent been able to determine if it stays at the new clocked speed when you reboot back into OSX.

I also had an issue after overclocking and then rebooting XP it gave me an error and I had to reset the VID card back to the original clock speed. It also doesnt show any benefit when gaming in XP to even have the card overclocked as the reading in the Catalyst program never seems to increase and I get enough FPS (400+) to get a constant "Connection Interupted" because the server can't handle the speed.

 

[vinylator]

Another question... How come when I play RTCW in OSX i can barely maintain 125FPS but if I play the same game with the same configs running under Win XP Pro i can get 333FPS and maintain it? It will even spike up to 500+FPS under Win XP.

This maybe evident that it is Apple who has the card underclocked and not ATI when it comes shipped. Or is OSX just that much more intensive on a video card.

RTCW is not an universal binary. It has to run under rosetta, hence, the slower framerate... (i think)

 

[knome]

Another question... How come when I play RTCW in OSX i can barely maintain 125FPS but if I play the same game with the same configs running under Win XP Pro i can get 333FPS and maintain it? It will even spike up to 500+FPS under Win XP.

This maybe evident that it is Apple who has the card underclocked and not ATI when it comes shipped. Or is OSX just that much more intensive on a video card.

not to mention that ATI is absoultly horrible at OpenGL, and i mean noticibly horrible. So using direct X9 may give you some performance boost.