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[News] Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4ANN.lu
Posted on 16-Jan-2002 16:48 GMT by Teemu I. Yliselä61 comments
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Bill Toner talked about issues regarding the support of ATI Radeon chipsets in AmigaOS4 on the AmigaOne mailing list. Read the message below.

ATI Radeon support will happen, but I'm not sure when it will be completed. Permedia 3 support has been announced as well. This will initially support the original Radeon chipset, RV100 that has been around a while, and will at some point support the newer Radeon chip, the RV200 as well. My business partner and I are the "other party" Hyperion mentioned in their OS4/Radeon/Permedia3 announcement a while ago for the Radeon part. We hope to have something usable soon, but it certainly won't be done by their announced OS4 release date in Feb. But it will most definitely be done for OS4.x, and I have had an AmigaOne on preorder as well for some time... Prometheus will be the first bridge supported, as that'a all that I have right now. We do intend to support Mediator if we can, but Elbox's sense of PR has kept me disgruntled with them and I have not signed/returned their NDA form yet, so we can't yet support Mediator but I'll do it soon, plus Mediator 1200 models at least will be more work due to their small memory window access point. Especially since some boards apparently work with 8MB window setting and some other older boards only work well with the smaller 4MB window setting. Elbox PR said something about the trashed graphics in 8MB mode were some hardware dongle feature or something like that, but I find that hard to swallow... But we'll work it out at some point and find a Mediator owner to test it with. When I originally contacted DCE about supporting Grex a year ago or so now, I still have yet to receive any response at all from them. So I'm not sure they wanted Radeon drivers for their card which I thought was odd, but oh well. Perhaps I should try them again... AmigaOne will also be supported via the AGP slot. Regarding Pegasos, my NDA with ATI does not have "Morphos" written on it anywhere. But I got this NDA back before I knew of the Pegasos project at all and I run AmigaOS on my Amigas, not anything else, so Morphos at the time didn't have much meaning to my machines as none of them even have PPC cards. AmigaOS 3.9 and AmigaOne/AmigaOS 4.x will be what we target while we consider if the effort in renegotiating the NDA is worth the returns from MorphOS users.

But please, don't run out and buy a Radeon card just yet. We may dongle-ize our drivers to some tag we set in Radeon cards we sell, in an effort to reduce P96 piracy. Elbox screwed the P96 guys, as not all Mediator users will pay the P96 "shareware fee" Elbox talked about. We are going to include fully licensed P96 (and possibly warp3d if they don't have licenses already with all PCI bridge companies) with Radeons we sell to guarantee both P96 team, warp3d team,  and my company get return on our work. I don't intend to trash talk anyone, but piracy is a fact of life. We intend to circumvent that a bit, in the same way that PicassoIV did. PC store-bought Radeons may not work, just a warning.

As for the porting of Mediator/Grex drivers to OS4.x, I wonder how this will be done. Surely if OS4 runs on Elbox's SharkPPC they will port Mediator drivers to that OS4 implementation, but I'm not sure they'll let their drivers work on hardware other than Mediator+SharkPPC. DCE may not have Grex drivers work under OS4 on hardware other than Grex. Hopefully they will support more bridges/motherboards, especially Elbox since they charge extra for their driver CDROM for Mediator anyway. We'll have to wait and see, but I'm not getting any hopes up. We'll be supporting any PCI bridge we can with Radeon drivers.

--
Bill Toner
Forefront Technologies, Inc. (previously Progressive Data Systems)
bill@prodatasys.com

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Comment 1Phill16-Jan-2002 16:41 GMT
Comment 2Anonymous16-Jan-2002 16:47 GMT
Comment 3Andreas Wolf16-Jan-2002 16:49 GMT
Comment 4Harald Frank16-Jan-2002 17:43 GMT
Comment 5Christophe Decanini16-Jan-2002 18:09 GMT
Comment 6[JC]16-Jan-2002 19:13 GMT
Comment 7BobsonSirJonny16-Jan-2002 20:10 GMT
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Comment 18Mika Hanhijärvi16-Jan-2002 22:34 GMT
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Comment 20Mika Hanhijärvi16-Jan-2002 23:01 GMT
Comment 21Seehund16-Jan-2002 23:48 GMT
Comment 22Frank17-Jan-2002 00:09 GMT
Comment 23Bill Toner17-Jan-2002 03:45 GMT
Comment 24Bill Toner17-Jan-2002 04:46 GMT
Comment 25priest17-Jan-2002 07:19 GMT
Comment 26Sotiris Papageorgiou17-Jan-2002 08:06 GMT
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Comment 36Alkis Tsapanidis17-Jan-2002 11:33 GMT
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Comment 38Christophe Decanini17-Jan-2002 12:22 GMT
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Comment 57Alkis Tsapanidis18-Jan-2002 11:20 GMT
Comment 58Anonymous18-Jan-2002 13:44 GMT
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 59 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by priest on 18-Jan-2002 15:23 GMT
In reply to Comment 58 (Anonymous):
people sometimes forget the bus width ;)
Correct me if I'm wrong (theorethical maximums):
IDE 8bit UDMA66 (66Mhz) - 66MB/s (From IDE drive's cache to computer system bus.)
PCI 32bit 33Mhz - 132MB/s (this is the standard PCI of PCI standard) ;)
PCI 32bit 66Mhz - 264MB/s (66Mhz works with some motherboards/cards)
PCI 64bit 33Mhz - 264MB/s
... (is there any 66Mhz capable 64bit cards/motherboards?)
(most PCI cards work only in 33Mhz limitting the whole bus to 33Mhz)
AGP1x 32bit 66Mhz - 264MB/s
AGP2x 32bit 66MhzDualPumped - 528MB/s
AGP4x 32bit 66MhzQuadPumped - 1056MB/s
... (8x is not really used yet, AGP's main feature is direct access to system memory)
memory bus performance is degraded by RAM chip capabilities, so I leave the calculation to someone else...
OCS, ECS and AGA access chip ram at 7Mhz clock. True or false?
OCS and ECS machines have 16bit chip RAM bus (theor. 14MB/s).
AGA machines have 32bit chip RAM bus (theor. 28MB/s).
020ec on the A1200 motherboard can access Fast RAM at 14Mhz clock. True?
On modern motherboards (x86, PowerMac, AmigaOne, Pegasos) the system memory bus is 64bit wide.
PC66 528MB/s (THEORETHICAL bus speed, chip latencies take it down...)
PC100 800MB/s
PC133 1064MB/s
DDR200 1.6GB/s (THEORETHICAL bus speed...) (100Mhz dualpumped)
...
Z2 is a 16bit 7Mhz bus (14M).
Z3 is a 32bit 7Mhz bus (28M).
PCI daughter cards on Z3 slot are limited by 28MB/s theorethical Z3 bandwith to CPU card memory.
( real life speed is around 10MB/s, true? )
PCI cards on the PCI daughter can access each other at full PCI bus speed (if the daugtercard supports it).
Does the bus from Mediator PCI daughter card on A1200 expansion slot have a 14Mhz 32bit bus (56MB/s) to CPU card memory?
(Or is it only 7Mhz or is it same as CPU clock?)
How about mediator A4k?
(CPU cards on A1200 accelerator slot or A2k/A3k/A4k CPU slot can have any memory bus width and speed to the RAM, so...)
Blizzard680x0 accelerators have 32bit buses at CPU clock (for example 50MHz).
BlizzardPPC has a 32bit memory bus, but what is the Mhz multiplier setting? Is the bus clock 33Mhz or 66Mhz or what??
BlizzardPPC has a 32bit gfx card bus, 33Mhz?
CyberstormMK1 and 2 have a 32bit bus at CPU clock
CSMK3 has a 64bit memory bus, even though the CPU has 32bit bus to bus ctrlr?
CSPPC has 64bit memory bus, but again, what's the multiplier setting/Mhz?
CSPPC has also 64bit gfx card bus, 33Mhz?
I think there exists 4 and 8 bit clockports on Amigas. What is the Mhz? How fast is the clock port "bus" when you add soundcard/USBcard/etc. there?
And, modern CPUs have superb fast buses to L1/L2 and L3 memory... but that one needs another day...
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List of all comments to this article (continued)
Comment 60Alkis Tsapanidis18-Jan-2002 17:29 GMT
Comment 61Christophe Decanini18-Jan-2002 18:23 GMT
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