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Best Radeon for a Power Mac G5?

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  • #1

    Best Radeon for a Power Mac G5?

    A friend of mine is still holding onto his Power Mac G5 and would like to try dual-booting OSX with Linux; maybe Ubuntu 14.04 which still seems to have an unofficial 64-bit PPC port.

    I don't know exactly what model gfx card he has currently but I do know its a Nvidia and I think he'd likely be better off switching that for a Radeon card as far as Linux is concerned altough I don't know what model would be best.

    So, what is the best AGP Pro Radeon graphics for use with Linux and OSX? Good 2D performance is more important for him than 3D so would any Radeon AGP card offer any hardware video decoding/encoding accel under both Linux and OSX? I would expect GPUs of such vintage to only handle MPEG2/4 in hardware, if at all.
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  • #2
    AGP / PCI Express?

    I thought the G5 used AGP but maybe its actually PCI Express, looking at the specs.

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    • #3
      I've found this list of recommended gfx cards for G4 and G5 Macs:

      G4 (and G5) AGP Graphics Card Upgrades: Part 2- OS X
      http://www.jcsenterprises.com/Japamacs_Page/Blog/4B4B7BA2-7ABB-47F1-87AC-B03D37942BEE.html


      So it looks like X850XT, X800XT or a 9800XT would be the cards to go for.

      Can anyone comment on the Linux compat. of these devices?

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      • #4
        According to this page:

        RadeonFeature
        http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/


        Non of the graphics cards I mentioned have any hardware video enc/dec support in the open source drivers.

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        • #5
          None of them have any useful video hw either (a mpeg2 MC block IIRC). Even if you did have driver support, 10% cpu reduction for mpeg2?

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          • #6
            Originally posted by curaga View Post
            None of them have any useful video hw either (a mpeg2 MC block IIRC). Even if you did have driver support, 10% cpu reduction for mpeg2?
            The mpeg MC block is just shaders. There is no special hw.

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            • #7
              The bigger issue is that gallium still needs some fixes for big endian.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by agd5f View Post
                The mpeg MC block is just shaders. There is no special hw.
                In r200, with those very limited shaders? Well, I bet at least the Rage cards have an actual hw block :P

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by curaga View Post
                  In r200, with those very limited shaders? Well, I bet at least the Rage cards have an actual hw block :P
                  on r3xx+ it was shaders. On r1xx/r2xx there was a special MC mode you could enable in the 3D engine.

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                  • #10
                    There were some patches on the lists for fixing endian issue iirc. Probably still to be applied.

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