7800 gtx rom

[henrymyf]

Nvidia 7800GTX Rom

Hi. I have that flashed card running on my Quad G5 rom is 2149, see attachement. Hope this will help.

pm7300, I have tried to flash the rom you uploaded with nvflash 5.15, and it worked very well! I'm putting up an screen shot here as a proof. Sorry it's in Chinese, but you will get the gist.

After the switch from 6600LE to 7800 GTX, the speed of my Mac G5 is much faster. I can open more tabs in the browser and the iPhoto app is more smooth. I feel unprecedentedly happy! Thanks again!

 

[tomnic]

Hi. Ati X1950XT benchmark-wise is rated slower than Nvidia 7800GTX, but you'll find it's not. I've tested it with X-Plane and Marine Aquarium and it performs better than 7800, look at FPS, therefore 7800 has more Vram so I can set X-Plane with a better rendering quality for a better smooth vision. Aperture 2 is slightly faster with 7800 but other apps such as Photoshop, Bridge, Quick Time they run equal or faster with Ati X1950XT, just make your own comparison with these cards.....
Here's the Rom for Ati Radeon X1950XT 256MB PPC, let me know if it works on your card.

Yes it works perfectly, but I had to upgrade to Leopard otherwise no 3d acceleration. Thanks a lot!!!

 

[Jubadub]

Yo, just registered for this thread. First, thank you SO MUCH pc7300 for your ROMs, just verified the GTX one matches the hash in that other thread, and below is the hash I got for the ATI one, to make sure we all got it right:

MD5 : 65acf045c136f0cd551d1b64e6cbe47e
SHA1 : 6cc7300fe4c77e263d053ede4eacb7cc1e686b56
CRC32 : 95aa1eef
SHA-256: 8bbb7a7c5e8d9c09cb6cdbd75f56be58a74f4afe25b88a17492db86bff7b4365
SHA-512: f423b1828bd486c62e120555bceacc479293a0b0cc39b89fccac0de6fb477381899f3b22035a4e2711e169dcca7517131048aacae20125318cf644e4bbc9881a
SHA-384: a62f79fd323c6cd223a4b969676fea2debc9daf31f776e3e38b73a3d8a3fbbbe5a75685adbb26aea807f91d9104af781

File Size: 65.536 (in bytes)
File Name: X1950MAC.ROM

Now, the question: Has there been, ever since then, even more powerful PCIe graphics cards which in theory should also be compatible with the G5 Quad Core, as long as a proper ROM for them is provided? (Even if said ROM doesn't yet exists.) Or has there been something in later NVidia or ATI graphics cards that simply were completely incompatible with the G5 Quad, to the point it's not about just the ROM anymore?

If such cards do exist, but corresponding modified ROMs don't yet, what should we be looking into to get them to work? Hex editing similar pre-existing ROMs of other GPUs? Decompile & recompile? Or?

EDIT: Incidentally, what about the 512Mb version of the ATI X1950 XT? Here we got the ROM for the 256Mb version, but wouldn't the 512Mb be much better? (As is the case between the 7800 GTX 512Mb vs. 256Mb, besides just VRAM.) In fact, wouldn't the ATI X1950 XT 512 Mb be completely doable, as it's part of the same family? Could it be someone has already done it?

EDIT 2: Also, I heard rumors of there being an NVidia GeForce 7900 GTX ROM for the G5 out there, as well? Anyone knows more about this?

 

[reddrag0n]

I am wondering that also, i have a 7800 GTX 256 MB card and wondering if it can be flashed for the PCI-e G5's or even the 2006 Mac Pro's.

Sticker on my card says...
EN7800GTX/2DHTV/256M/OSP/A
5AX0AG101878

BIOS Version 5.70.02.11.01

On the PCB itself, it says...
nVidia 180-10347-000-A03

 

[Jubadub]

@reddrag0n, from what people have been saying, there's no known modified ROM of the 256Mb version of the 7800 GTX. When I dug up that sort of stuff as much as I could, I couldn't find anything. Same goes for my question regarding the 512Mb version of the ATI X1950 XT (called ATI X1950 XTX, if I recall correctly, which today I "happen" to own). And same goes for the 7900 GTX.

But this whole thing is not over yet. Answering my own question, "are there theoretically better cards that are technically-compatible, but lack a modified ROM", the answer is "yes, a fu!kton of them". Basically, any PCIe card is a potential candidate, as they all DO work on the G5 even today, but under GNU/Linux (and maybe also regular BSDs?) instead, without any flashing required, because there are drivers for those cards. We can see one such instance in this video from Luigi Burdo on YouTube, equipped with an AMD Radeon 6570, which has 2Gb GDR5 VRAM! (According to him in the credits, anyway. Seems like at least one Mac-OS-X-compatible card needs to be inserted alongside in another PCIe slot, perhaps the x16 slot, however, but still.)

The catch, though, of course, is that since the late G5s have PCIe 1.0, the highest-end cards, all of which are PCIe 3.0 today (and soon PCIe 4.0), won't work at their full potential. But you can keep pushing the machine up all you want with them. The returns ARE there, although diminishing.

Theoretically, it should be possible to port the Linux kernel drivers to work with Tiger and Leopard on the G5 (assuming the drivers are even open-source, because Linux is full of closed-source binary blobs, too). Both the endianness and the archictecture (PPC) have been addressed in those drivers already, but there's more to porting them to Mac OS X. Now if you ask me "how do we go on about porting those drivers?", my answer is a near-absolute "I don't know". I have zero knowledge for most things low-level (hardware interfacing), and both graphics cards and video processing as a whole (other than that they are awesome for SIMD processing). But if anyone is serious about this, it's possible. It can be done.

 

[jmilan0302]

@reddrag0n, from what people have been saying, there's no known modified ROM of the 256Mb version of the 7800 GTX. When I dug up that sort of stuff as much as I could, I couldn't find anything. Same goes for my question regarding the 512Mb version of the ATI X1950 XT (called ATI X1950 XTX, if I recall correctly, which today I "happen" to own). And same goes for the 7900 GTX.

But this whole thing is not over yet. Answering my own question, "are there theoretically better cards that are technically-compatible, but lack a modified ROM", the answer is "yes, a fu!kton of them". Basically, any PCIe card is a potential candidate, as they all DO work on the G5 even today, but under GNU/Linux (and maybe also regular BSDs?) instead, without any flashing required, because there are drivers for those cards. We can see one such instance in this video from Luigi Burdo on YouTube, equipped with an AMD Radeon 6570, which has 2Gb GDR5 VRAM! (According to him in the credits, anyway. Seems like at least one Mac-OS-X-compatible card needs to be inserted alongside in another PCIe slot, perhaps the x16 slot, however, but still.)

The catch, though, of course, is that since the late G5s have PCIe 1.0, the highest-end cards, all of which are PCIe 3.0 today (and soon PCIe 4.0), won't work at their full potential. But you can keep pushing the machine up all you want with them. The returns ARE there, although diminishing.

Theoretically, it should be possible to port the Linux kernel drivers to work with Tiger and Leopard on the G5 (assuming the drivers are even open-source, because Linux is full of closed-source binary blobs, too). Both the endianness and the archictecture (PPC) have been addressed in those drivers already, but there's more to porting them to Mac OS X. Now if you ask me "how do we go on about porting those drivers?", my answer is a near-absolute "I don't know". I have zero knowledge for most things low-level (hardware interfacing), and both graphics cards and video processing as a whole (other than that they are awesome for SIMD processing). But if anyone is serious about this, it's possible. It can be done.

I'm pretty sure Leopard supported newer cards like the 8800GTX, wouldn't it be possible to use a GPU with an Open Firmware ROM to boot, then just use the newer card? Only issue I can see is the drivers are probably Intel specific.

 

[Jubadub]

I'm pretty sure Leopard supported newer cards like the 8800GTX, wouldn't it be possible to use a GPU with an Open Firmware ROM to boot, then just use the newer card? Only issue I can see is the drivers are probably Intel specific.

Oh, right, I forgot Leopard is Universal, so it is interesting to think of the possibility that GPUs supported by the Mac Pro (Intel Mac) could be supported on the G5 provided another, G5 compatible card is inserted, much like what is seen in that video with PPC64 Debian. Unless the Leopard drivers for such cards are, unlike the rest or most of Leopard, architecture-specific, and not Universal, making them truly Intel-only.

In any case, that's some interesting thought you had there! Mac Pro Leopard-compatible cards seem like a good place to start and check.

But, sadly, I don't have ANY Intel Mac GPU, and I definitely cannot prioritize getting one now, especially when I don't have a computer I can use it on in case that plan fails. But perhaps others can.

In any case, whether that trick works or not, the highest-end PCIe cards are way, way past the league of any card Leopard supports, even considering Intel-era Mac machines. So even if this trick works, we won't be getting to the bottom of this until we get those other cards working (and then Tiger won't have to be excluded, either, hopefully).

By the way, this got me thinking: a flashed ATI X1950 XT is allegedly the fastest/strongest GPU available for PPC Leopard, but Tiger doesn't recognize it properly. Meaning this is a DRIVER issue. Now, the question: could Leopard's GPU drivers be somehow imported to Tiger?! What would achieving such a goal require? What tasks are necessary, and what steps are to be followed? I have no idea where Mac OS X drivers are installed, or how they are installed, or how their OS X version compatibility works. Perhaps someone else would know the answer to those?

 

[Jubadub]

I bring results! Turns out that I didn't even need (yet?) to import Leopard drivers to Tiger to make Tiger fully use the ATI X1950 XT 256Mb! Just downloading and installing the driver (for X1900) straight from ATI/AMD worked! Direct download link for every Late 2005 G5: https://www2.ati.com/drivers/MacX1900G5.dmg
Really didn't expect to see results from just this, considering this came out when Tiger was at 10.4.7, which is far from 10.4.11, and that no extra downloads are required for Leopard.

Now the pictures.

Before:

After:

Notice how Core Image and Quartz Extreme went from "Not Supported" to "Supported", and how Rotation, which was missing altogether, is now listed as "Supported".

But the issue? System Profiler still reports 128 MB of VRAM. But the ATI program correctly reports it as 256 MB. Is there any way I can find out which one is correct? Say I run enough games simultaneously on Tiger to fill up the VRAM: where can I check or monitor the VRAM?

Still, this is awesome. I can tell the driver actually works, because without it, the GPU fan is "ignored" (it forever spins super fast or, if you were on Leopard then rebooted straight to driverless Tiger, it's weak), but with the driver installed, it behaves exactly as it does under Leopard.

For completion, here's what Leopard shows:

Notice how it says "Hardware Accelerated" instead of "Supported" for Core Image in Leopard, but that's just how Leopard and Tiger report support for Core Image regardless of GPU. Nothing more than a change in nomenclature. The Leopard System Profiler reports things in general a bit differently compared to Tiger's. I just personally confirmed this with a stock NVIDIA GeForce 6600 on both Tiger and Leopard to make sure.

 

[DearthnVader]

But the issue? System Profiler still reports 128 MB of VRAM. But the ATI program correctly reports it as 256 MB. Is there any way I can find out which one is correct? Say I run enough games simultaneously on Tiger to fill up the VRAM: where can I check or monitor the VRAM?

Install Developer Tools and use OpenGL Driver Monitor, it has the features you seek.

 

[Jubadub]

Alright, great news! Thanks to DearthnVader's life-saving suggestion, I confirmed the card works PERFECTLY under Tiger, VRAM included. This means although system profiler reports 128MB of VRAM and ATI's program reports 256MB, the latter is not only correct, but also is what is actually used by Tiger. Here is one piece of evidence (look at the "Current Free Video Memory" line):

Tiger:

Leopard:

GPU benchmarking from XBench also gave it the exact same score under both systems, if that's worth anything.

I installed the driver on 10.4.11 Tiger, Server Tiger PowerPC and Server Tiger Universal. It works flawlessly in all 3 PowerPC-compatible versions.

But there was an unexpected catch: with specifically Server Tiger Universal, the system gets a kernel panic late during boot. Which means I couldn't get to a point I could install the driver. So for that end, I had to unplug the X1950XT, turn the G5 on, and only then could I install the driver. (I used the stock GeForce 6600.)

With the driver installed, I put the X1950XT back in, and boom! It works!

But then I noticed something VERY interesting. Have a look:

The system is reported to have 256MB VRAM even in the system profiler! What the?! And what's more, looks how it says "Hardware Accelerated" for Core Image! In other words, this version of the system profiler is behaving just like Leopard's! Although it's just a visual difference in nomenclature, it's as if the Server Universal version of Tiger is slightly closer to Leopard than Server PowerPC and "Client" PowerPC are!

I didn't expect that at all. Kinda really cool.

For completion, here's the PCI Cards page:

And the system version code/number:

Now, what's left? I "happen" to also have the 512MB version of this card, called X1950XTX, which also has a slightly higher clock and also slightly faster VRAM. And it is rumored the ROM used for the 256MB version would also work with the 512MB version, although stuck with the 256MB of VRAM.

And that card is looking at me with fear right now.

 

[reukiodo]

Could the ROM be edited to increase the memory size? (for either the 7800GTX or the X1950XTX)

 

[Jubadub]

Could the ROM be edited to increase the memory size? (for either the 7800GTX or the X1950XTX)

The ROM we have for the 7800 GTX is already for the 512MB version, so fortunately that is covered. The problem is actually the opposite: we lack a 7800 GTX ROM for the 256MB version. I have no idea what would happen if the 512 ROM was flashed on a 256MB card... At best it would work until it tries to access more VRAM than the physical limit, and at worst nothing of it will work.

As for editing the ROM to be able to detect more VRAM for the X1950XTX, reading about it everywhere online gave me the impression it's not feasible. But you know, I wonder about that myself everyday. (Same goes for a 256MB 7800GTX ROM).

For the GTX, I wonder if using the unmodified 7800 GT (not GTX) ROM would do the trick? Both have 256MB of VRAM.

About the X1950XTX, I do have one idea, but I'm not sure what the odds of success of such an approach are. Both the X1950XT and X1950XTX have a fully-functional PC ROM/BIOS. If we do a comparison between the two binaries, and see where they are equal and where they are different (I think a number of tools can do that), it may give us an idea where to hex-edit in the corresponding Mac ROM/BIOS that already works for the X1950XT. Although this assumes both the XT and XTX have the same ROM sizes. I didn't check (yet). If different, this may be a lot harder.

In any way, as with lots of things, it's possible. "Where there is a will there is a way."

Although the true way to move forward with the G5 is to go get modern PCIe 3.0 cards working, even if partially (due to PCIe 1.0 speed limitations). But for me, that can wait until I'm done with the XTX. (I'll be able to get my hands on a strong-enough power supply to do the flashing with within a week. In both times, I had to borrow it.)

Incidentally, I do have to say one thing: I don't yet know what to do with "so much power". As in, I tried finding the HEAVIEST programs in graphical tasks I could find for the G5, and for starters I decided to give Doom 3 and Quake 4 a try at the most maximum of settings (on my non-HD, puny single-link DVI monitor, though). Everything plays smoothly "too easily". By that, what I mean to say is that I'm struggling to find software with which I could really push the X1950XT to its limits. Maybe I'd be able to tell the difference in higher resolutions, but the official GeForce Quadro, although weaker, is still strong enough to also play these games completely smoothly.

By that, I mean to say, for all other PCIe G5 owners out there, the official Quadro can easily be considered a "good-enough goal". To give words of encouragement to anyone who, for whatever reason, doesn't have one of those flashed GPUs.

 

[reukiodo]

I thought flashing the 7800 GTX 256MB with the 7800 GT Mac ROM had already been covered, as long as the flash chip was large enough to fit the Mac ROM.

I've done this myself with a PNY PC 7800 GTX 256MB single-slot which happened to have a large enough flash chip for the Mac ROM. It works fiine, but at the slower speeds (and therefor less performance) of the 7800 GT.

 

[Jubadub]

Well, I successfully flashed the X1950XT ROM into a X1950XTX. The result?

See that smaller glitch box? That's the mouse icon, which I can move.

Needless to say, turns out using that ROM on the 512MB version of the card doesn't work, and the myth of claims of it working is false. (With that ROM, anyway.)
Before flashing, I backed up the original XTX ROM, and turns out it's 128k big. The Mac one we use on the XT is 64k only, though. (Not sure how big the original XT ROM is for PC. Gotta check.) So it fits, but I'm not sure if we are supposed to write another 64k of 0s to avoid leftover garbage and prevent it from interfering (if it does).

With a second GPU on SLOT-3, I could boot normally and see the XTX (as X1900) and all, so I know the flashing itself worked. 256MB and all.

But this ROM has to be modified beforehand. At first, we knew that was a requirement for the VRAM to be fully used. But now, we see it's also a requirement for the card itself to work properly at all.

Always good to learn something everyday!

 

[Jubadub]

Reviving this old thread to correct myself on one simple thing I was wrong about:

The ATI X1950XTX, which is a 512MB card, is NOT "the 512MB version of the X1950XT" (no extra "x" at the end).

There is an actual 512MB version of the X1950XT, but it has the exact same specs as the 256MB version, VRAM size aside.

And said 512MB X1950XT can be flashed with the X1950XT ROM from here, but as noted before, only 256MB will be "seen". I know this, because I came to own both cards earlier this year, and confirmed all this.

The XTX is a close, more-performant relative, but without its own ROM, the result from flashing it is what we see in my pictures above.

 

[ax81]

I bring results! Turns out that I didn't even need (yet?) to import Leopard drivers to Tiger to make..

Hey there, I was hoping you could share some insight to help solve the trouble that I am having. I'm trying to flash my x1900gt with a ppc mac rom and so far I've tried the X1950XT bios posted in this thread and the X1900GT bios posted on the macelite rom repository, every time I get a blank screen upon bootup (the chime is there though), the stock 6600LE works fine. I installed the ATI driver and control panel beforehand. I flashed the card in a windows pc using atiwinflash114, I know the card is functional, since I've already tested it under Windows and it can be flashed back to both x1900gt and the pc version of x1900xt 256mb. The Mac I have is a G5 Quad running OSX 10.5.6. Have you run into an issue like mine (because I've seen other similar old threads with this particular issue but no resolution), while flashing your cards? Could it be OS related, because I'd really hate to reinstall it, I've got so much stuff installed already. Any advice is very welcome. Thank you.

PS.

The pc I using for flashing uses a Radeon 5450 pci as the main gpu, so Atiflash appears to be working properly, the only other thing I can think of is that it could be an issue with the Atiflash version being used for this. What version did you use?

 

[Jubadub]

Not sure if I can help, but I remember using ATI Winflash under Windows on my X1950XT originally, and that failed once I tested the card out. Ultimately I had to boot under DOS instead (FreeDOS), and use not ATI Winflash, but plain old ATI Flash (some 16-bit version). It's been a long time since I did that, so I don't know the exact version number of the utility, but it was one of the many versions of the 3.x family, IIRC. I remember only specific versions would work, so in the end I grabbed every version and tested them out, one by one.

It seems you did everything you should on the OS X side. But if all else fails, yes, reinstalling i.e. Leopard clean is a step to be considered.

That card you got is one of the single-slot greats for PPC Mac OS X, definitely worth the effort. Good luck!

 

[ax81]

Not sure if I can help, but I remember using ATI Winflash under Windows on my X1950XT originally, and that failed once I tested the card out. Ultimately I had to boot under DOS instead (FreeDOS), and use not ATI Winflash, but plain old ATI Flash (some 16-bit version). It's been a long time since I did that, so I don't know the exact version number of the utility, but it was one of the many versions of the 3.x family, IIRC. I remember only specific versions would work, so in the end I grabbed every version and tested them out, one by one.

It seems you did everything you should on the OS X side. But if all else fails, yes, reinstalling i.e. Leopard clean is a step to be considered.

That card you got is one of the single-slot greats for PPC Mac OS X, definitely worth the effort. Good luck!

What were the symptoms of your failed flashes?

 

[Jubadub]

What were the symptoms of your failed flashes?

I don't recall, that was circa 3 or 4 years ago. I wonder if it was the same as yours. Maybe no video, but it would still boot? It feels like it happened forever ago...

 

[ax81]

I don't recall, that was circa 3 or 4 years ago. I wonder if it was the same as yours. Maybe no video, but it would still boot? It feels like it happened forever ago...

Were you using motherboard pcie power or molex to pcie adapter on your G5?

 

[Jubadub]

I would always connect the dedicated motherboard connector for powering extra-demanding PCIe GPUs, yes.

 

[RetroDan]

So I flashed a 7800 gtx 512 with the ROM from post #14, and it 'works' but I have graphical corruption. I dumped the original ROM before flashing, but I can't boot my flashing computer with the now Mac compatible 7800GTX in it - I just get beeps on boot. How do I reverse this?

 

[DearthnVader]

So I flashed a 7800 gtx 512 with the ROM from post #14, and it 'works' but I have graphical corruption. I dumped the original ROM before flashing, but I can't boot my flashing computer with the now Mac compatible 7800GTX in it - I just get beeps on boot. How do I reverse this?

Lift the ground leg of the EEPROM and install a simple switch. Boot the PC and make the switch, then run NVFLASH to restore the PC ROM.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

In the past i have used a second graphic card for flashing the "mac cards".

 

[RetroDan]

Lift the ground leg of the EEPROM and install a simple switch. Boot the PC and make the switch, then run NVFLASH to restore the PC ROM.

I can't identify which chip on the back is the BIOS chip. My eyes aren't good enough to read the small text. Think you can tell me which one it is?

In the past i have used a second graphic card for flashing the "mac cards".

Unfortunately, all of my native PCs are older models without PCIe slots or 'office' computers with only a single 16x slot.

EDIT: Crap. Accidentally double-posted while trying to edit my previous post.