Tip:- ATI Rage 128 in Leopard

[Hughmac]

Taken from a discussion in another thread, decided to start anew rather than hijack someone else's questions ...

I managed to get Leopard 10.5.8 running on my Pismo with G4 550 upgrade; System Profiler showed the right graphics card (ATI Rage 128) but no extensions loaded for it.

A little research lead me to http://nanchatte.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/installing-old-ati-rage-pro-128-video-drivers-from-tiger-into-leopard/ which describes how to use the ATI kexts from Tiger 10.4.11 in the Leopard installation.

Although the kexts greatly improved graphics response and enabled the system to run DVD Player (previously it would not open at all), the downside is that I get screen artifacts of the cursor when it changes shape from a pointer to a hand, but I find this acceptable.
DVD Player now opens but I get sound with no video - the screen remains black; I've even tried VLC with the same result.

Anyway, the point is that installing Tiger ATI kexts in Leopard on any unsupported machines should get your graphics working much better.

Tiger ATI kexts attached for those who need 'em

Cheers

Hugh

 

[three]

Although I don't have any Macs that could benefit from this, I really appreciate this post. Thanks for sharing this information!

 

[Hughmac]

Thanks, it's good to keep the PPC flag flying!

Cheers

Hugh

 

[G4fanboy]

Anyway, the point is that installing Tiger ATI kexts in Leopard on any unsupported machines should get your graphics working much better.

I use shadowkiller in my G4 DA dual GHz with aticellerator to overclock a little my ATI rage 128 pro AGPx4 from panther thru leopard. I readed somewhere that the easy way for making the kexts thing was to install tiger and then update to leopard. Also some people with portables recomended Puma/Jaguar kexts, so we should try which of them gives better performance.
I have noticed that my GHz dual G4 with the Ati rage 128 make dock transpartent as if i have a Quartz comp graphic card in tiger and leo

 

[ifrit05]

...I have noticed that my GHz dual G4 with the Ati rage 128 make dock transpartent as if i have a Quartz comp graphic card in tiger and leo

The Dock is always transparent if there's GPU acceleration or not. on the other hand the Menubar in Leopard and up is only transparent if GPU acceleration is active.

 

[eyoungren]

I use shadowkiller in my G4 DA dual GHz with aticellerator to overclock a little my ATI rage 128 pro AGPx4 from panther thru leopard. I readed somewhere that the easy way for making the kexts thing was to install tiger and then update to leopard. Also some people with portables recomended Puma/Jaguar kexts, so we should try which of them gives better performance.
I have noticed that my GHz dual G4 with the Ati rage 128 make dock transpartent as if i have a Quartz comp graphic card in tiger and leo

What settings are you using with ATIcellerator?

I've got the ATI Rage 128 PCI (not the Pro) as a secondary video card. Want to accelerate it a bit, but not fry it (or my system). Right now I have it at around 5% on both processor and memory.

 

[G4fanboy]

What settings are you using with ATIcellerator?

I've got the ATI Rage 128 PCI (not the Pro) as a secondary video card. Want to accelerate it a bit, but not fry it (or my system). Right now I have it at around 5% on both processor and memory.

The truth is I used to install ATIcellerator until the last month that I used a HD from my G4 to my G3 and ATIcellerator was so up in the G4 that the G3 could not boot. I decided to not using it until I finish my "master" installs. Now my G3 and G4 only use shadowkiller, but I used to have both.

I have 3 rage 128. 2 pci 128 gl and one AGPx4 from the DA . One of the pci´s is faster than the other and have a mpeg2 decoder(?) piggy card. From the time I used ATIcellerator the more overclocable one was the AGP then the quicker pci and the slower did not get too much . I tried until I finded that no artifacts were present. It depends on the mods you have made on the tower. I am not using the cpu cooler that all dual Ghz use. I use a fan as big as the one that push air to the pci and agp cards at 7 volts and with this set up the rage 128 pro was letting me overclock to incredible setting 140-200% on memory and clock on aticellerator.

----------

The Dock is always transparent if there's GPU acceleration or not. on the other hand the Menubar in Leopard and up is only transparent if GPU acceleration is active.

OH yes! I wanted to say menubar! Thanks for the accurate info!
I wanted to say that with original cpu 466 wasn´t and when I swapped cpu´s it raise some flag to make it transparent just for the speed of the cpu and not the graphic card. I think it "eats" a whole processor for the eyecandy of coreimage on my dual Ghz.

Shadowkiller really speeded up the GUI

Talking back about the kext, I think we should compare the kexts for Puma-Jaguar with the Panther and Tiger ones. When 10.0, Puma and Jaguar started they fully supported all the DA configs (Steve Jobs said it on a keynote) and that includes the last Rage 128 Pro from the 466. The point is that for sure one of them should give bigger performance than the others.

My Rage 128 loves vlc 0.8.6. from panther. The rest of vlc versions drops more frames. I used 0.8.6 on tiger and leopard with better results than the tiger and the leopard version.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

I remember my 466MHz with the Rage card was painful under Leopard, but adding a Radeon 9600 XT really brought the GUI up to speed.

 

[G4fanboy]

Let´s keep talking ´bout RAGE 128!

I remember my 466MHz with the Rage card was painful under Leopard, but adding a Radeon 9600 XT really brought the GUI up to speed.

The pain goes with shadowkiller. I pick a window and move the mouse quickly left to right to left to... Without the shadows the windows seems to move 2x-3x quicker. Double click on shadowkiller (the shadows of the windows appear again) and it cames the pain you talk about. I have shadowkiller as a Startup Item from Panther to Leo, and all my Mac Os X instal

I understand that CoreImage is a must for Leo and I know I can change my graphics card for one 2002-2006, but the time it had last the rage 128-PSU make me think I want to keep using them some more time. For sure it will last 5 years more, but dunno about a Radeon 9600-9800-X3 because of my small PSU and the power drain and durability of Radeon HOT cards.

I want to see me as a Pismo user that cant change it for solidarity with the high number of Rage128 users that can´t change it and economic reasons.So I insist on benchmarking the 4 ATI kexts: Puma, Jaguar, Panther and Tiger to find the fastest one.

A little research lead me to http://nanchatte.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/installing-old-ati-rage-pro-128-video-drivers-from-tiger-into-leopard/ which describes how to use the ATI kexts from Tiger 10.4.11 in the Leopard installation.

Hugh

I have an Panther install, so I will upload the kexts from panther soon.

 

[WhiteyFisk]

Thank you for this! I posted just last month about poor performance with the Rage 128 in Leopard. If I don't manage to find a better video card at a reasonable price, I will most definitely be trying this method.

 

[Hughmac]

Glad to hear it's of some use.

Here, the kexts from Panther ...

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Hughmac]

... and those from Jaguar

I haven't tried any of these yet, so have fun

Cheers

Hugh

 

[G4fanboy]

Glad to hear it's of some use.

Here, the kexts from Panther ... Jaguar

Cheers

Hugh

Hugh, how can we benchmark both? Panther-Tiger are the more modern for sure. Xbench? Geekbench? Cinebench? The winter is coming...

 

[Hughmac]

I will do an xbench, possibly tomorrow morning (it's bedtime here) as I'm on a late shift.

Will do it on the Pismo, first without any ATI kexts, then one by one through the others, and put up the results when done.

In the meantime, if anyone else wants to have a go as the Pismo has only 8mb video RAM and any differences might not be that astounding ...

Cheers

Hugh

 

[G4fanboy]

I will do an xbench, possibly tomorrow morning (it's bedtime here) as I'm on a late shift.

Will do it on the Pismo, first without any ATI kexts, then one by one through the others, and put up the results when done.

In the meantime, if anyone else wants to have a go as the Pismo has only 8mb video RAM and any differences might not be that astounding ...

Cheers

Hugh

I have been thinking about using Kext utility for make it quicker, but really do not know if it is universal.

Also we should compare AppleDVDPlayer app from panther, tiger to the leo one. Probably the tiger app will work flawless

 

[Hughmac]

Nah, Tiger DVDPlayer.app does not work in Leopard, I've tried it.

I've also tried Kext Helper and as it's for Hackintosh use it's Intel only.

I think I can install them by opening the disc up in Pacifist, otherwise I will do it long hand through Terminal.

Good night !

Cheers

Hugh

 

[ifrit05]

Hmm... Maybe when I get my Computer Room set back up I'll fire up Xcode and build a "Kext Helper" for us PPC folks.

But all you really need to do is set the permissions correctly per kext and or Repair Permissions from within DU.

 

[Hughmac]

Hmm... Maybe when I get my Computer Room set back up I'll fire up Xcode and build a "Kext Helper" for us PPC folks.

Great idea, I'd love to see this.

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Hughmac]

ATI kext test results

Well, here are the Xbench results for the various kexts I've tried, as you can see the Jaguar ones come out on top due to the OpenGL marks:-

Without any ATI kexts:-

Results 13.84
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.8 (9L30)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 550 MHz
Version 7410 (Nitro) v1.4
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 220 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,RageM3
Drive Type FUJITSU MHT2080AH FUJITSU MHT2080AH
Quartz Graphics Test 14.28
Line 13.64 908.17 lines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 9.16 2.73 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 11.13 907.48 circles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 29.05 732.63 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 22.99 1.44 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 13.42
Spinning Squares 13.42 17.03 frames/sec

OpenGL results seem as good as Jaguar, but poor Quartz marks

With 10.2 Jaguar kexts:-

Results 16.61
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.8 (9L30)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 550 MHz
Version 7410 (Nitro) v1.4
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 220 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,RageM3
Drive Type FUJITSU MHT2080AH FUJITSU MHT2080AH
Quartz Graphics Test 21.83
Line 19.51 1.30 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 17.27 5.15 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 17.79 1.45 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 33.96 856.66 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 29.22 1.83 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 13.41
Spinning Squares 13.41 17.01 frames/sec


With 10.3 Panther:-

Results 14.49
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.8 (9L30)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 550 MHz
Version 7410 (Nitro) v1.4
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 220 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,RageM3
Drive Type FUJITSU MHT2080AH FUJITSU MHT2080AH
Quartz Graphics Test 21.51
Line 19.56 1.30 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 17.36 5.18 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 17.49 1.43 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 33.96 856.67 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 26.91 1.68 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 10.93
Spinning Squares 10.93 13.86 frames/sec


And with 10.4 Tiger:-

Results 14.12
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.8 (9L30)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 550 MHz
Version 7410 (Nitro) v1.4
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 220 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,RageM3
Drive Type FUJITSU MHT2080AH FUJITSU MHT2080AH
Quartz Graphics Test 21.32
Line 19.68 1.31 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 17.05 5.09 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 17.45 1.42 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 33.30 840.03 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 26.49 1.66 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 10.56
Spinning Squares 10.56 13.39 frames/sec


Hope this helps someone; personally I'm keeping the Jaguar ATI drivers until I find something better

Cheers

Hugh

 

[G4fanboy]

Hope this helps someone; personally I'm keeping the Jaguar ATI drivers until I find something better

Cheers

Hugh

Wow. At the end the myth is busted! Thanks for your time to make it and research about it!

It points that Jaguar is the best kext compared to Panther and Tiger on your ATI Rage Mobility 128 graphics with 8 MB of SDRAM . Maybe we can go back in time more! 10.1 improved graphics performance compared to 10.0, so maybe next round is a Smackdown 10.1 vs 10.2.

ATI Rage 128 is a BIG family. From the iMac 350 to the iMac G3 700, Pismos to Titanium.

Maybe the part of the family that cant go Leopard can get benefits using Jaguar kexts on Tiger (?)

I will test on my PM G3 B&W with Rage 128 GL tiger and on Leo on my PM G4 with Rage 128 Pro AGPx4

 

[Hughmac]

Unfortunately I don't have a 10.1 disc, and I couldn't find any extensions on the 10.0.3 disc I do have.

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Intell]

10.1 was a free update from 10.0, much like 10.9 is free. Check Apple's site for the 10.1 download and check it for any usable kexts.

 

[harrymatic]

Hmm... Maybe when I get my Computer Room set back up I'll fire up Xcode and build a "Kext Helper" for us PPC folks.

I'd really like to see this as well - it's such a pain having to tinker around with the terminal and delete the cache, etc. - especially if you are swapping kexts around to try something out. It's a shame it's not like the Classic days, where you'd put something in the Extensions folder and have done with it.

 

[Hughmac]

10.1 was a free update from 10.0, much like 10.9 is free. Check Apple's site for the 10.1 download and check it for any usable kexts.

Thanks for that, I've extracted the kexts from the 10.1.5 combo update, attached below.

Will test tomorrow sometime.

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Hughmac]

Xbench results for Puma kexts:-

Results 13.72
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.8 (9L30)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 550 MHz
Version 7410 (Nitro) v1.4
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 220 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,RageM3
Drive Type FUJITSU MHT2080AH FUJITSU MHT2080AH
Quartz Graphics Test 14.14
Line 13.58 904.03 lines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 9.02 2.69 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 11.03 899.09 circles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 28.73 724.70 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 22.85 1.43 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 13.32
Spinning Squares 13.32 16.90 frames/sec

The ATI 128 driver is not loading at all, so the figures are similar to the 'without kexts' results.
No ATI extensions shown in System Profiler, perhaps these are a little too old to work.

Still no video on DVD playback, but I'm sticking with Jaguar drivers

Cheers

Hugh