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raferx · Dec 10, 2002, 09:21 PM

I'm thinking of getting a Radeon PCI card to go with my nVidia GF4 mx AGP in a DP 1GHz (QS) I thought I had heard of issues between the two cards not playing nice... any truth to it?
Thanks in advance!

CubieDubbie · Dec 10, 2002, 10:57 PM

A PCI card is not going to be as fast as the AGP. But I have the same exact combination in a Dual 867. One Radeon PCI card and one Nvidia AGP card. There is a program for the PCI card I have that is supposed to make it Quartz compatible. All I can say is I guess it works as I have not had any problems with it, except I can tell you the PCI card is slower than the AGP card. To be fair about this my PCI card is an ATI Radeon Mac Edtion made well over a year ago. It is a 32 meg. card.

I am changing to a Radeon 9000 which will remove both of the cards I presently have and give me 32 meg's of memory per monitor. I presume accurately that this will speed things up. The ATI 9000 is under $200.00. As to when it is actually available I can not say for sure. But, I have one on order. Thats about all I can tell you about it.

raferx · Dec 11, 2002, 05:27 AM

Originally posted by CubieDubbie:
A PCI card is not going to be as fast as the AGP. But I have the same exact combination in a Dual 867. One Radeon PCI card and one Nvidia AGP card. There is a program for the PCI card I have that is supposed to make it Quartz compatible. All I can say is I guess it works as I have not had any problems with it, except I can tell you the PCI card is slower than the AGP card. To be fair about this my PCI card is an ATI Radeon Mac Edtion made well over a year ago. It is a 32 meg. card.

I am changing to a Radeon 9000 which will remove both of the cards I presently have and give me 32 meg's of memory per monitor. I presume accurately that this will speed things up. The ATI 9000 is under $200.00. As to when it is actually available I can not say for sure. But, I have one on order. Thats about all I can tell you about it.

Why is a PCI based card not "stock" compatible with Quartz? Why would the PCI card be much slower, the bus for both cards is the same? I'm completely in the dark here kiddos! My AGP card is 64 MB, but running two Sony 19" at 1600 x 1200 seems to make my screen saver "chug" slightly. I figured it was because I'm maxing out the card... I do a lot of video/composting work now, so if it's affecting the performance of playback on my screen saver, it goes that it would affect high res tiff sequence playback as well... so I thought if I got a Radeon 7000 32 MB card off a buddy, I would see an improvement. Am I wrong?

redJag · Dec 11, 2002, 05:18 PM

Originally posted by raferx:

Why is a PCI based card not "stock" compatible with Quartz? Why would the PCI card be much slower, the bus for both cards is the same? I'm completely in the dark here kiddos! My AGP card is 64 MB, but running two Sony 19" at 1600 x 1200 seems to make my screen saver "chug" slightly. I figured it was because I'm maxing out the card... I do a lot of video/composting work now, so if it's affecting the performance of playback on my screen saver, it goes that it would affect high res tiff sequence playback as well... so I thought if I got a Radeon 7000 32 MB card off a buddy, I would see an improvement. Am I wrong?

Probably because Apple thought PCI cards wouldn't benefit from Quartz, but I don't claim to be an expert in this area. PCI cards are slower because they are almost ALL 33Mhz (though it was possible to run 66Mhz, no one did it). Most AGP cards are 66Mhz (although 33Mhz AGP are accepted in the same slots). AGP slots also have a better bandwidth bridge. New versions of AGP offer technologies that help speed it up as well (I don't understand them, I'm just led to believe this) such as fastwrite transfer, sidebanding, other cool things..

raferx · Dec 11, 2002, 07:23 PM

Originally posted by redJag:

Probably because Apple thought PCI cards wouldn't benefit from Quartz, but I don't claim to be an expert in this area. PCI cards are slower because they are almost ALL 33Mhz (though it was possible to run 66Mhz, no one did it). Most AGP cards are 66Mhz (although 33Mhz AGP are accepted in the same slots). AGP slots also have a better bandwidth bridge. New versions of AGP offer technologies that help speed it up as well (I don't understand them, I'm just led to believe this) such as fastwrite transfer, sidebanding, other cool things..

The PCI slots in the Dp 1GHz (QS) are 66MHz... and so is the Radeon 7000 card... will I notice a video performance increase by installing a Radeon 32 MB PCI card rather than just using my single 64 MB DDR RAM GF4mx to drive both my Sony monitors?
Anyone out there?

CubieDubbie · Dec 11, 2002, 08:53 PM

raferx,
ok the PCI slots are 66 mhz. but, I suspect (I am no expert here either) that you will find the AGP card will always be faster than the PCI. You are running OSX?? Get a PCI card and download something called pciextreme. It's supposed to take advantage of Quartz. However, I can't tell you from experience whether it does or does not. Somewhere there should be some speed spec's on AGP and PCI. And I still stand by saying I would expect PCI no matter what is slower than AGP. If I am wrong I certainly will say sorry. But, I have doubts that I am.

TheMosco · Dec 11, 2002, 10:41 PM

Originally posted by raferx:

Why is a PCI based card not "stock" compatible with Quartz? Why would the PCI card be much slower, the bus for both cards is the same? I'm completely in the dark here kiddos! My AGP card is 64 MB, but running two Sony 19" at 1600 x 1200 seems to make my screen saver "chug" slightly. I figured it was because I'm maxing out the card... I do a lot of video/composting work now, so if it's affecting the performance of playback on my screen saver, it goes that it would affect high res tiff sequence playback as well... so I thought if I got a Radeon 7000 32 MB card off a buddy, I would see an improvement. Am I wrong?

A PCI card i believe is going to offer speed of 133 MBps at i 33Mhz and double that at 66Mhz i think or is might be 133 at 66Mhz, i can't really remember.

AGP 2X offers speeds of 533MBps and AGP 4X offers speeds of 1066MBps so there is a huge speed difference.

The PCI card is not "stock" for quartz extreme because if you ran all that data through the PCI bus, it might slow other PCI cards down so apple instead requires you to use an AGP slot.

If the screen savers used opengl to render than you might see a slowdown when running them on screens that big. But i dont know if adding a card would make tiff animations go any faster.

raferx · Dec 12, 2002, 03:31 PM

Originally posted by TheMosco:

A PCI card i believe is going to offer speed of 133 MBps at i 33Mhz and double that at 66Mhz i think or is might be 133 at 66Mhz, i can't really remember.

AGP 2X offers speeds of 533MBps and AGP 4X offers speeds of 1066MBps so there is a huge speed difference.

The PCI card is not "stock" for quartz extreme because if you ran all that data through the PCI bus, it might slow other PCI cards down so apple instead requires you to use an AGP slot.

If the screen savers used opengl to render than you might see a slowdown when running them on screens that big. But i dont know if adding a card would make tiff animations go any faster.

Cool, thanks for the responses everyone, I'm installing the PCI card today, so I'll let people know if there is a difference.

raferx · Dec 13, 2002, 03:11 AM

Ok, I installed the latest ATi Radeon drivers for OS X.2, ran PCI Extreme, installed the card, and BOOM! Everything runs great! Video playback, and Open GL are much smoother across the board in a variety of apps. My screen savers no longer look "slow" Open GL is incredibly smooth now at 1600x1200 @85hz on both monitors. QE is working beautifully on both Sony's. The PCI Extreme Radeon fix is working like a champ. I give the whole experience a huge thumbs up! Just FYI, I am running all video window apps on the 64 MB AGP card, and all my pallets are on the 32 MB PCI card. Thanks for all your feedback everyone!

rv6ar100gspd · Dec 14, 2002, 01:09 AM

I tried to use this card in my G4 933 tower about six months ago. It generally worked fine with the finder and other low end programs but when I tried to use Final Cut Pro 3 (the reason that I got the card and the extra monitor) the live video contained in the onscreen FCP3 "monitor" would go blank/coloured bars/coloured boxes etc.
After a lot of talking to both ATI support and Apple FCP support with nothing other than "it should work" to show for it I gave up and bought a flat panel display so I could have both monitors on the NVIDEA card. A few months later I saw some postings that indicated that the Radeon driver that came with the card (and you were directed to install "before installing the card") should be replace with the driver that came on the Apple system restore disk. On ATI's web site there was only one driver and it was the same one as provided on the CD. I suspect that maybe Apple tweaked ATI's driver to deal with some problem but didn't tell ATI. At any rate I didn't play with it as I had solved the problem in a different way.
Hope this helps

raferx · Dec 14, 2002, 03:26 AM

Originally posted by rv6ar100gspd:
I tried to use this card in my G4 933 tower about six months ago. It generally worked fine with the finder and other low end programs but when I tried to use Final Cut Pro 3 (the reason that I got the card and the extra monitor) the live video contained in the onscreen FCP3 "monitor" would go blank/coloured bars/coloured boxes etc.
After a lot of talking to both ATI support and Apple FCP support with nothing other than "it should work" to show for it I gave up and bought a flat panel display so I could have both monitors on the NVIDEA card. A few months later I saw some postings that indicated that the Radeon driver that came with the card (and you were directed to install "before installing the card") should be replace with the driver that came on the Apple system restore disk. On ATI's web site there was only one driver and it was the same one as provided on the CD. I suspect that maybe Apple tweaked ATI's driver to deal with some problem but didn't tell ATI. At any rate I didn't play with it as I had solved the problem in a different way.
Hope this helps

I am using the card mainly with FCPRO3, AE 5.5, and DVDSPRO. No problems whatsoever! I am very sorry to hear you had problems with your install. Did you run PCI Extreme with your set-up? The ATi driver I used was an updated version from 10/02... maybe that fixed the problem you were encountering. I'll be in Kamloops for Xmas, I hope there is snow!