[Ian_Bullock]

Is it really true that those of us with the older dual G5 powermacs are stuck with the X800XT as the fastest graphics card that will ever come out for an AGP 8x slot? Or are there still new ones in development? It just seems silly that a computer that without major modification could have 8GB of ram, and 1.5 TB of HDD space (assuming two 750GB drives installed) could be limited to a 256mb video card forever.

Are there any workarounds, anyway that a PCI-E slot could be installed, or anything like that to make the newer cards compatible? I have limited knowledge on this one, sorry.

Ian

[Leonard]

Yeah, us PowerMac G5 with AGP 8x owners are pretty much stuck with the Radeon X800XT or Geforce 6800 Ultra as the top end card, unless you don't mind flashing or modding graphics cards, in which case someone apparently got a Geforce 7800GTX working in a PowerMac G5 Experimental GeForce 7800 GTX for Dual-Core G5 Power Macs

[dimmer]

You won't be able to install a PIC-E slot (of if you did, it would be external and linked via the AGP or... ugly ugly ugly.

Not to diss at all, but what app are you using that can take advantage of more than 256MB of video card ram?

[Ian_Bullock]

Originally Posted by dimmer 

You won't be able to install a PIC-E slot (of if you did, it would be external and linked via the AGP or... ugly ugly ugly.

Not to diss at all, but what app are you using that can take advantage of more than 256MB of video card ram?

To be honest, I'm not using anything that would be limited by the 256mb video card, but I was worried that it will become obsolete before the rest of the computer that's all. And I'm also annoyed that because that card is the best there will ever be, it's cost is going to stay artificially high - you can get hold of the pc version for £40 ($80) off Ebay these days, because it's no longer a top of the range card for PCs. Basically, I'd like to get one, but they can't be had for under $299, which seems unreasonable for a 2 year old video card.

Was just interested to see if people had done workarounds. And thanks, I'll check out that flashing article. Would that mean the pc version of the 8x AGP X800 XT might be amenable to flashing aswell?

Thanks so far, Ian

[BigBadBiologist]

There's a lot of info here about the x800 cards:
strangedogs.com - Login

Unfortunately, I think the guy who was doing the majority of the 7800GTX cards went MIA and I haven't read up on those enough to know how easily they convert. Supposedly the 7800GS AGP cards convert nicely.

[mduell]

Yea, GPU (6800U/X800XT for AGP PowerMacs, 7800GT for PCIe PowerMacs) and CPU (none at all, you can't even use chips from later PowerMacs) upgradeability for the G5 PowerMacs is pretty miserable.

[P]

Worth noting that the options for PC users with AGP aren't exactly stellar either at this point. There are bridged 7900s and X1900s available at inflated prices, but there are no true AGP boards of the current generation.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by P 

Worth noting that the options for PC users with AGP aren't exactly stellar either at this point. There are bridged 7900s and X1900s available at inflated prices, but there are no true AGP boards of the current generation.

True, none of the "enthusiast" cards are going to use AGP natively since the enthusiast users have moved to PCIe. But the AGP versions are only a ~$30-50 premium over the PCIe versions.

There's a big difference between a PC X1950PRO AGP for $230 (available everywhere) and Mac X850XT AGP for $350 (if you can find one): ~60% faster for ~35% less money.

[Big Mac]

Yeah, but the most important difference is that one is compatible and the other is not.

[mduell]

How successful/feasible is flashing PC cards? Still hard to find one with a big enough videobios?

[BigBadBiologist]

Best to read up on Strangedogs about all the options. From personal experience, I do know that the 9800 pros have a very high success rate and still have decent performance and no bigger ROM chip needed if you use the right ROM.

[voth]

Rather silly question, but does it have to be a specific Geforce 6800 card? Looking over at Newegg there are a few choices for 6800 cards.

[BigBadBiologist]

In general, the ROMs for all nVidia cards need to be fine-tuned to their specific cards. 6800 series are particularly tricky because there are so many varieties (vanilla, GT, ultra, XT, GS) that all have different numbers of pipelines and core revisions. From there, there are also different types of RAM used and the RAM timings tend to be card-specific. I believe ROMs exist for all of these but you would have to be really careful about selecting a card and setting up your ROM. Do a lot of homework before just buying anything.

[molarszbt18]

AGP is kinda out the door with the faster PCI-X, thats what sucks with the computer world there is always something better coming out.

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by molarszbt18 

PCI-X

PCIe

[Leonard]

Originally Posted by molarszbt18 

AGP is kinda out the door with the faster PCI-X

As Lateralus is pointing out PCI-X is NOT PCI-Express. PCIe is the short abbreviation for PCI-Express which replaced AGP, PCI, and PCI-X.

[SierraDragon]

Originally Posted by molarszbt18 

...thats what sucks with the computer world there is always something better coming out.

A lot of folks feel that way; personally I disagree 180 degrees! I think it is just great that things get better and cheaper all the time. My first hard drive for a Mac Plus circa 1986 was 10 MB for US$1200 and today 500 GB can be had for US$150. I think that evolution is a very good thing, and still consider the $1200 (1986 dollars) for 10 MB the best computer expenditure I ever made.

The protocol is simple: buy mid to high end carefully planning for expected future needs and do not look back. Replace in 3-5 years when needed. That protocol has never failed me since the 128k Macs, except when the new killer app Aperture obsoleted my 1.67 GHz G4 PB in about 1 year.

Note that the above "carefully planning for expected future needs" is important. Otherwise it is fairly easy to get stuck with inadequate unupgradeable graphics cards or whatever. We have to plan around evolving technologies, because IMO it is not rational to expect vendors to always invest in tiny markets of new componentry for legacy hardware.

-Allen Wicks

[molarszbt18]

I am not saying its bad, in someways it is good. I do think it needs to slow down and security needs to be brought in because with the increase in speed and productivity and the easy of hackiness (is that a word) is just going to get worse. Security is a big thing on my list as well as backups of computers in general more then the speed of a computer.

[paulc]

It's a sad buy unfortunate truth that one DOES have to accept that for a GPU, you are going to get a fairly limp stock card AND be very limited in what you can upgrade it to, and THAT choice is going to mean paying a lot more than wintelians do.

My impression is that this situation isn't all that different today with the Mac Pro. One is still "stuck" with a weak stock card or a very expensive "other" choice.

[Ian_Bullock]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Yea, GPU (6800U/X800XT for AGP PowerMacs, 7800GT for PCIe PowerMacs) and CPU (none at all, you can't even use chips from later PowerMacs) upgradeability for the G5 PowerMacs is pretty miserable.

Yeah, I was actually going to ask about CPU upgradeability. Are you saying I couldn't even upgrade my Dual 2.0GHz to a dual 2.7Ghz? Why not? Are the bus speeds and mother board architecture that different?

I was kind of hoping that some of the new chips IBM is supposed to be bringing out next year would be an option... Still, I've got faith in the aftermarket upgrade companies - if they managed to find a way of upgrading the GPU and CPU capabilities of powermac G5 I bet they'd suddenly be onto a winner, so they must be working on it, right? I mean they've gotten PMG4's up to 2GHz now, and got Tibook 667s and 550s up to 1.25, upgraded Pismo's to G4 500s, and (for a limited time anyway) G3 1Ghz. What would be the difference with the G5s? Or is it just that IBM haven't made any better chips since the switch to Intel, so the upgrade companies won't have anything to work with?

[OreoCookie]

There are no CPU upgrades commercially available and it doesn't look like that will change. It doesn't have anything to do with IBM making them (there are faster versions of the G5 out there), but that they won't sell in such small volumes to companies like Powerlogix.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Ian_Bullock 

Yeah, I was actually going to ask about CPU upgradeability. Are you saying I couldn't even upgrade my Dual 2.0GHz to a dual 2.7Ghz? Why not? Are the bus speeds and mother board architecture that different?

I was kind of hoping that some of the new chips IBM is supposed to be bringing out next year would be an option... Still, I've got faith in the aftermarket upgrade companies - if they managed to find a way of upgrading the GPU and CPU capabilities of powermac G5 I bet they'd suddenly be onto a winner, so they must be working on it, right? I mean they've gotten PMG4's up to 2GHz now, and got Tibook 667s and 550s up to 1.25, upgraded Pismo's to G4 500s, and (for a limited time anyway) G3 1Ghz. What would be the difference with the G5s? Or is it just that IBM haven't made any better chips since the switch to Intel, so the upgrade companies won't have anything to work with?

That's correct. There are no aftermarket CPU upgrades for the PowerMac G5. You can't buy the faster processors from another PowerMac and drop them in there.
I don't know why they're so inflexible. But to me it feels like they were designed to be that way.
What new chips from IBM? There's nothing on their roadmap even tangentially related to the G5 (PPC970).

On the brighter side, all of the Intel desktop Macs are quite upgradeable, from top to bottom. You can put a 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo in your 1.5Ghz Core Solo Mac mini or a 2x2.66Ghz quad core Xeon in your 2x2.0Ghz dual core Mac Pro.

[Salsa]

I've seen cheap video cards for Windows that have hardware acceleration for H.264, WMV, and DivX. Is there anything like that for our G5 Macs? I have only a GeForce FX 5200 card. Will any other card help with video playback? Thanks.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Salsa 

I've seen cheap video cards for Windows that have hardware acceleration for H.264, WMV, and DivX. Is there anything like that for our G5 Macs? I have only a GeForce FX 5200 card. Will any other card help with video playback? Thanks.

"Cheap" cards for PCs ($50ish) are still expensive cards ($200ish) for Macs.
The video decoding acceleration depends on both the hardware and the drivers; AFAIK the OS X drivers don't support the various hardware acceleration platforms (AVIVO from ATi, PureVideo from nVidia).

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by mduell 

I don't know why they're so inflexible. But to me it feels like they were designed to be that way.

Check out http://www.970eval.com/970FAQ.html#anchor%234

My reading of that indicates that designing upgrades for the G5 would be nontrivial at best.

[Salsa]

Originally Posted by mduell 

"Cheap" cards for PCs ($50ish) are still expensive cards ($200ish) for Macs.
The video decoding acceleration depends on both the hardware and the drivers; AFAIK the OS X drivers don't support the various hardware acceleration platforms (AVIVO from ATi, PureVideo from nVidia).

When Apple started pushing the h.264 codec, I thought that they would introduce video cards for it right away since the codec is so CPU intensive. Here we are years later and I can't even play ws 720p content smoothly on my dual G5. Granted, I have a lot of apps open in the background, but they are all lightweight stuff like web, e-mail, calendar, usenet, etc. I would have gotten a Mini for the living room if it could play HD video. I hear that even the Core Duo Minis struggle with h.284 unless you boot it into Windows.

So, do you have any idea why Apple hasn't done something about this? I guess we'll all eventually have enough horsepower in the CPU for HD, but it looks like it will still be a while. I was hopeful about the Apple TV until I heard that it wont play the content I already have on my hard drive in the more common formats, MPEG1, MPEG2, .ifo, DivX, etc. For $300 and even less, there are media players that will handle all those formats.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Salsa 

When Apple started pushing the h.264 codec, I thought that they would introduce video cards for it right away since the codec is so CPU intensive. Here we are years later and I can't even play ws 720p content smoothly on my dual G5. Granted, I have a lot of apps open in the background, but they are all lightweight stuff like web, e-mail, calendar, usenet, etc. I would have gotten a Mini for the living room if it could play HD video. I hear that even the Core Duo Minis struggle with h.284 unless you boot it into Windows.

The Core Duo Macs are all fine with 720p H.264... even my 1.83Ghz Pentium M (no video card acceleration) can play 720p H.264 just fine. Most, if not all, of the Core Duo Macs should handle 1080p H.264 just fine.

edit: Apple says you need a 1.83Ghz Core Duo for 720p and 2.0Ghz Core Duo for 1080p... if you use VLC instead of QuickTime I think you'll be just fine for 720p with a 1.66Ghz machine and you may be able to get 1080p to play without dropping frames on a 1.83Ghz.

[Salsa]

Originally Posted by mduell 

...Apple says you need a 1.83Ghz Core Duo for 720p and 2.0Ghz Core Duo for 1080p...

I have never tried playing video on a Mac Mini, but there is a group of people on the DVR forum who are very enthusiastic about booting the Mini into Windows (MCE). They say that there is a more efficient software codec for h.264 that only runs in Windows. Personally, I find that having just the minimum hardware requirement for a video codec never makes for a satisfactory experience. There are always occasional glitches, slugishness, and fast forward and rewind don't work.

[paulc]

The only 720p content I've played is the movie trailers. On a dual 2.7G/X800XT (all OS up to the minute) system, there will be a few hiccups sometimes. Most do play fine for the 2 minutes or so, but I have seen ones that glitch at times.

[Salsa]

For some reason, the movie trailers I downloaded also played more smoothly on my system than the h.264 content I encoded myself or received from friends. I think they must tweak the settings to make them less CPU intensive, even though that means larger file sizes, but I don't know.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Salsa 

For some reason, the movie trailers I downloaded also played more smoothly on my system than the h.264 content I encoded myself or received from friends. I think they must tweak the settings to make them less CPU intensive, even though that means larger file sizes, but I don't know.

They're probably using the lower complexity Baseline profile.