[spork]

hello,
Am a powerbook user who has become hopelessly addicted to 2 monitors since moving to powerbook 867 and then 1,33 both 12" from my original mac, a 12" 500 ibook. Currently use 17" CRT with powerbook VGA adapter to keep correct color balance while working with photoshop. Photos are main gig along with some DVD's coming from imovie, FC Express and DVDSP 3.

Now, just got 533 dual 533, 640mb, 40gb which has a video card in AGP slot, with Apple adapter and VGA out and a 15" NEC flat panel LCD.

the question - what would be the best combo of price and value in a VGA PCI video card to hook up the flat panel, since CRT goes to original video card where photos will be worked with? The flat panel is for tools, paletes, mail, ical, you get the idea, etc and doesn't require either heavyweight video or DVD. How cheap can this card get while still retaining quality.
thanks and all the best,
Mac yesterday, Mac today and Mac forever

[Kenneth]

How abou the ATI Radeon 9200 Mac Edition?
http://www.ati.com/products/radeon92...0me/specs.html

[MORT A POTTY]

I concur

http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_It...m=ATI100436011

130 bucks.

includes DVI to VGA adapter and S-Video to composite adapter as well. this is the only PCI video card worth considering. Sonnet also has a PCI video card... it's 100 bucks and isn't as good, but it is an option.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/sonata_sd.html

[deboerjo]

Since your AGP video is doing all the real work, pretty much anything 4MB+ should do fine for the 2nd monitor. To save a bundle of money, I'd recommend a 4MB IMS Twin Turbo.

-Jon

[kiazer]

I would say a Rage 128 16megs PCI card would be fine - on ebay they are cheap.

[spork]

Thanks for the great responses with rock solid advice. have to admit, I am heading towards the lowbuck option, but all advice and info is greatly appreciated.
Can I use a video card from a beige G3, ie is the PCI bus the same, outside of the obvious speed of the original equipment?
thanks again.
these forums rock.

someday we will all be guided by the one true system.

[Skip Breakfast]

The PCI bus should be the same between the two.

someday we will all be guided by the one true system.

Huh?

[spork]

Great comments and super helpful. I ended up picking up an Rage 128 on ebay for under $50 with shipping. It should take care of me great.
all the best in 2005.

about the one true path, of course, non PC.

thanks again.

pbook 12" 133
g4 533 dual

[Cadaver]

Why get a PCI card? For only a bit more, you can replace the AGP card with one that will drive two displays, and save the PCI slot for something else?

Radeon 9000 2x/4x AGP 128MB $145.99

Plus, with a dual-head AGP card, both displays will be Quartz Extreme accelerated.

[spork]

I don't have anything else in any of the PCI slots.
Will probably get a USB2 card and maybe a video capture card but they would be it.
What is quartz extreme? Have seen it around, but ????
love these forums

[Mac Hammer Fan]

Quartz Extreme enables Quartz on PCI Macs. Normally Quartz is only for AGP Macs, because they are faster.
The Quartz Extreme hack doesn't work with 10.3.7 and there are other problems, e.g. with DVD playback. I tried it on my G3 Beige with G4 ZIF and ATI Radeon 7000. Not worth it.

[Luca Rescigno]

Wrong. Quartz Extreme is a graphics technology that does... well, something, I don't know how it works. But the result is that the graphical effects are a whole lot faster and better looking. Expos� looks very nice with Quartz Extreme enabled, and kind of grainy and crappy without it.

According to Apple, you need an ATI Radeon or nVidia GeForce 2MX or better video card to handle the technology. A minimum of 16 MB of VRAM is required to use it, and 32 MB is recommended. Remember that if you connect both displays to a single video card, it will split the VRAM between them. But all QE-supported video cards have 32 MB of VRAM anyway, so you'll always have enough.

Quartz is a different technology that came out earlier than Quartz Extreme. I think it was part of OS X starting with the introduction of Aqua in 2000. Quartz Extreme came out in 2002, as part of Jaguar.

The Quartz Extreme hack for PCI video cards is called PCI Extreme. It still only works on PCI Radeons, which include the Radeon 7000, the faster original Radeon, and the new Radeon 9200.

If you want dual monitors, the cheapest way is to just buy something like a Rage 128 PCI for your PowerMac. If you're willing to pay for a performance upgrade which will make OS X much nicer to use, I would suggest getting a new dual-monitor AGP video card. Since you have a Digital Audio machine, you can use a Radeon 9600. They cost $120 and have dual digital outputs. If you want two VGA monitors, you'll just need one DVI-VGA adapter and one ADC-VGA adapter. The Radeon 9000 might be an acceptable option because it has 128 MB of VRAM, therefore giving you 64 MB per display, but it's not as fast. It's also more expensive, at $150.

By the way, you can pick up all this stuff at Other World Computing. They sell the Radeon 9000, 9200, and 9600.

[P]

Every program draws the inside of each window into memory, and then relies on the windowserver to draw what is actually visible to the screen. Whenever any windows are moved (including when new windows are opened or old ones closed, windows change size, etc) this has to be redone.

What Quartz Extreme does is essentially this: Those windows are drawn into memory as usual, but then they are treated as textures for 3D objects and transfered into the graphics board's onboard texture memory. Those 3D objects are of course the windows - think of a 3D scene with almost zero depth, and large flat objects moving around on it, changing height. That's what happens - the window contents is painted on top. The task of redrawing the windows is then left to the onboard GPU.

This means several things for the speed. First, the windowserver doesn't need any CPU for redrawing anything. Second, it doesn't need any main memory bandwidth for redrawing anything - the active windows are stored in the graphics memory and only use that internal bandwidth. There are other benefits as well, but that ought to do it for now. The end result is a major difference

I'd spend my money on a good dual-head AGP board so you can use QE on both screens. There is a trick that will let you use QE on PCI boards as well (called "PCI Extreme"), provided they have a T&L unit, but a real AGP board is best. All boards that have "Geforce" in the name have a T&L unit, as well as all boards with "Radeon" in it EXCEPT Radeon VE and Radeon 7000

[Luca Rescigno]

Well, I do know that the Radeon VE/7000 didn't have a T&L unit, but does that really prevent them from using Quartz Extreme? I'm pretty sure there are a number of people with QE enabled on their Radeon 7000s. They're popular among Cube users who want something cheap and fanless that is still an improvement over the Rage 128.

[P]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
Well, I do know that the Radeon VE/7000 didn't have a T&L unit, but does that really prevent them from using Quartz Extreme? I'm pretty sure there are a number of people with QE enabled on their Radeon 7000s. They're popular among Cube users who want something cheap and fanless that is still an improvement over the Rage 128.

T&L is texture and lighting. That unit also includes clipping. The way I understodd it was the T&L unit is integral in determining which texture to show, which window is in front the other. It may be that the OS manages to fill in for the lack of a T&L unit by using the main CPU for this, but in that case I think there'd be a noticeable slowdown.

[deboerjo]

Originally posted by P:
T&L is texture and lighting. That unit also includes clipping. The way I understodd it was the T&L unit is integral in determining which texture to show, which window is in front the other. It may be that the OS manages to fill in for the lack of a T&L unit by using the main CPU for this, but in that case I think there'd be a noticeable slowdown.

No, T&L is transform and lighting, and it is necessary for accelerated scaling and moving.

Cards without T&L can theoretically still run quartz extreme with some hacking (I've never seen this done myself), since transform operations are just done in software by the drivers, but that negates the whole point of QE; offloading windowing tasks from the CPU to the GPU.

[P]

Originally posted by deboerjo:
No, T&L is transform and lighting, and it is necessary for accelerated scaling and moving.

Argh. Braindamage. You're right, deboerjo, don't know what I got that from.

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by deboerjo:
Cards without T&L can theoretically still run quartz extreme

T&L has zero to do with Quartz Extreme. QE requires:
1) rectangle textures (any card newer than Rage128)
2) some bandwidth to upload texture data (Apple says AGP 2x, more is better)
3) some VRAM to hold texture data (Apple says 16 megs, more is better)

Quartz Extreme is officially supported on hardware without T&L, i.e. the 2001 TiBook (Gigabit Ethernet) with Radeon 7000 mobility.

T&L accelerates transform/lighting/clipping of geometry. Great for games pushing millions of polys. Irrelevant for the window manager pushing a few dozen.

[Luca Rescigno]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
Quartz Extreme is officially supported on hardware without T&L, i.e. the 2001 TiBook (Gigabit Ethernet) with Radeon 7000 mobility.

You're right about everything EXCEPT that no Apple computer has ever shipped with a Radeon 7000. The GigEthernet TiBook had a standard Mobility Radeon, not a 7000. The Radeon 7000, like I said before, is simply a popular upgrade for a lot of people with Rage 128s who want QE for as little money as possible. As long as you're not gaming it's fine.

[deboerjo]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
T&L has zero to do with Quartz Extreme. QE requires:
1) rectangle textures (any card newer than Rage128)
2) some bandwidth to upload texture data (Apple says AGP 2x, more is better)
3) some VRAM to hold texture data (Apple says 16 megs, more is better)

Quartz Extreme is officially supported on hardware without T&L, i.e. the 2001 TiBook (Gigabit Ethernet) with Radeon 7000 mobility.

T&L accelerates transform/lighting/clipping of geometry. Great for games pushing millions of polys. Irrelevant for the window manager pushing a few dozen.

My bad, I thought I remembered reading somewhere that Quartz took advantage of the T part of T&L, but you're right, that'd be kinda pointless with the tiny number of polys involved. All the supported video cards just happen to also have T&L (didn't know about the '01 TiBooks).

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
You're right about everything EXCEPT that no Apple computer has ever shipped with a Radeon 7000. The GigEthernet TiBook had a standard Mobility Radeon, not a 7000.

Radeon Mobility == Radeon 7000, get yourself a 667 MHz TiBook (Gigabit Ethernet) or a 700 MHz iBook (Mid 2002) and look at the glinfo to convince yourself. In contrast, the original desktop "Radeon" card was a Radeon 7200 which includes T&L, like the 7500 and 7500 Mobility.

The Xserves also get a Radeon 7000 PCI card, FWIW.