I was wondering if there was anyone out there who has managed to find an acceptable video card solution for driving an SGI flat panel monitor under OS X.

A little history:

Before Apple's flat panel dispays were available one of the best choices for flat screen real estate was the SGI flat panel. These monitors were expensive and had specialdigital TFT connectors. The SGIs first shipped with a card from a company called Number 9 (now defunct I think) and later with a ProFormance 3 card from Formac. Both the 9 card and Proformance card were powered by the same Formac chip and were driven by the same formac software. Under OS 9 these cards work great giving speedy 2D performance (which is what I was looking for). But formac has totally dropped the ball when it comes to OS X. The company has basically abandoned the Proformance line (they say they have no plans to offer X support for this card and have managed to piss off lots of people by consistently lying and failing to give straight answers). They have even refused requests to release the OS 9 driver source code to aid a group of programmers offering to try to write an open source X driver.

Anyway those of us with these cards and monitors are basically stuck. The cards work in OS X but unacceptably slowly. The solution until now is to buy a new display or to stick with OS 9.

I've recently heard of something called a multilink adapter and was wondering if anyone had experience with them...
http://www.monitoroutlet.com/097875.html

We have 12 SGI monitors here and have been offered a deal so it might be a solution. I was wondering if anyone has actually used one of these adapters under OS X with an ATI 128 Rage Pro card or a NVIDIA GeForce4 card.

Also I was wondering if anyone has come up with any other solutions to connect a monitor with a TFT connector any of the standard X supported cards.

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My 1953 Cadillac is for sale. Check it out.

[chatwood2]

i have an SGI 1600sw with the formac card and under OS X it does not perform well. the multilink adaptor will solve your problem. I used one with an 1600sw and a geForce2 mx and it worked great. for that card you need to get an ADC-DVI adaptor cable ($50) and connect the multilink to the DVI port.

i think the geForce4 mx has a ADC and a VGA port, so with those you would need the ADC-DVI, but i've heard the geForce4 TI will have and ADC and a DVI, so just the multilink is needed.

to connect to an ATI Rage128 pro you could use a multilink, but i would not suggest it. the mutlilink's have digital (DVI) and analog (VGA) inputs. the rage 128 pro only has VGA output, so you would have to connect in analog. I have done this before and quality is not great, i got ghosting and a blurry image. quality is much much better going digital. I would upgrade the computer with ATI Rage 128 pros to radeon or better (radeons have DVI).

if you are getting a special deal on multilinks i would love to get one or two if possible, email me at [email protected]

- Chris

[ 02-16-2002: Message edited by: chatwood2 ]

[Timo]

I use the multilink with an SGI 1600 in OS X and I'm happy with it. I get some small artifacts on the far right, but the problem is apparently with my Pismo's hardware.

[mandavia]

I'm using the SGI 1600SW with a multilink on 10.1 on my G4 with a Geforce2 - it seems to work well at 1600x1024 - I do believe that gaming at lower resolutions is a problem though.
Diku

[barbarian]

multi-links are so expensive it might make more sense to just sell the SGIs and buy a new flat panel with a native plug.

The caddy is sweet. Why are you selling?