X1950Pro AGP (512MB) Sapphire is ... acting weird.

[oliver]

Hi phoronix readers!

As you all I waited too for this new magic driver to fix world hunger and what not. Or atleast get me 2D/3D working system, unfortunately, my 'older' R500 card isn't supported in this driver. Oh well, bummer I suppose. Since I do would like to have a working system with my X1950Pro, I was hoping you guys could help me out figuring out what's going wrong/on here.

I have a new, old (not used)AGP board with a VIA KT800Pro chipset, 2GB memory with dualcore opteron. I have 2 Sapphire cards to my availability, a X1950Pro 512MiB and a X1950GT 256MiB.

The X1950GT works with 8.34 and 8.33 (It should work with 8.32 but gentoo won't let me emerge it cause I need an older kernel).

The X1950GT works quite well with 8.34, I can play UT2004 for a few hours without problem.
The X1950Pro gives me strange behavior on 8.33 and 8.34, I shot a video (with my crappy cam sorry) what happens on a default Ubuntu Feisty Fawn install.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of1i4lHAukg

Seems to me all accelerated 2D stuff doesn't even work. I didn't run glxgears in that vid, but pretty much the same happens, I get window borders, but an empty window.

With the drivers that are on the liveCD (the 2d ones or the Vesa once, not entirely sure, the X1950Pro works just fine (unacccelrated and such of course).

Under windows Both cards work flawlessly of course.

With the newer drivers I get lockups on the Pro, Not 100% sure what happens with the GT, but i'm fairly sure lockups aswell, cause I kept running the 8.34 driver, specifically blocked anything higher.

Hopefully someone can help me on this one, as the 8.41 wet pants release, didn't water my pants

[Dadeos]

I experienced what sounds like the same problem that you are having with one of these cards. I found that increasing the ?AGP Aperture? setting in the system?s BIOS resolved it.

Hope that helps?

[oliver]

OMG you totally made my day/week/MONTH!

I had it set to 128MB which I figured would be plenty full (I don't want my games using the system ram right?)
So with the GT this is half the amount, but since the Pro has more mem, this would explain it.

Now I hope that that was the reason why my WoW kept crashing after 2 or 3 seconds (on the GT, haven't tried it on the Pro)

It's still a driver bug, but at least now I got something that's reportable as I found the cause!

Thank you Dadeos! you are my hero

[mabco]

so....

OMG you totally made my day/week/MONTH!

I had it set to 128MB which I figured would be plenty full (I don't want my games using the system ram right?)
So with the GT this is half the amount, but since the Pro has more mem, this would explain it.

Now I hope that that was the reason why my WoW kept crashing after 2 or 3 seconds (on the GT, haven't tried it on the Pro)

It's still a driver bug, but at least now I got something that's reportable as I found the cause!

Thank you Dadeos! you are my hero

So which AGP setting worked for the x1950 pro(512) ?
I cannot get 3D to work on this card at all with any of the drivers from the AMD site.

[oliver]

So which AGP setting worked for the x1950 pro(512) ?
I cannot get 3D to work on this card at all with any of the drivers from the AMD site.

Anything above 256 works for me. The thing is, 3d worked as well as 2d. E.g. i couldn't use the card at all!

I'm thinking you may have a diff issue?

[Alistair]

OMG you totally made my day/week/MONTH!

I had it set to 128MB which I figured would be plenty full (I don't want my games using the system ram right?)
So with the GT this is half the amount, but since the Pro has more mem, this would explain it.

Now I hope that that was the reason why my WoW kept crashing after 2 or 3 seconds (on the GT, haven't tried it on the Pro)

It's still a driver bug, but at least now I got something that's reportable as I found the cause!

Thank you Dadeos! you are my hero

I'm seeing some misinterpretations of AGP aperture and I figured I'd try to help people understand.

agp aperture is a 'window'
it does not use up your ram.
agp aperture allows the cpu to create a region of system memory addresses that map directly into video memory. I.E the system has 1gb of ram. The video card has 256mb of ram. the cpu can address (linearly) up to 4gb of ram. Thus agp sets up the address range from 1280Mb to 1560Mb as a 256mb map of addresses that are in reality the memory on the video card. This 'window' can be any logical size from 4mb on up to the limit of available extra addressing, based on power of 2 and 4k memory pages.
Your bios dictates what 'sizes' are available. If video memory is larger than the aperture, the agp code will page the window around (i.e adjust the mapping) to cover all of available video memory. it is ***this paging*** that appears broken in the fglrx driver when the card is pcie based, using the pcie to agp bridge. Thus the agp aperture must be = to video memory.

I've also found with my X1650Pro that the 512mb on board is actually split into two allocations of 256mb (one for each head) thus I have my agp aperture set to 256mb for the x1650pro, I have added videomem=256m to my kernel boot parameters, and set maxgart size in xorg.conf to 256mb.
The card works with these settings all in place for the new drivers, but ***never*** initializes agp mode - leavig the bus operating at *cough* PCI speeds and rendering large scale data transfers ridiculously slow. 3d yes - 2d yes - big performance jump from my trusty 9550 s**t no ... especially when playing WoW in wine. Or quake anything. Or sadly, even tuxracer.

/me hops down off soapbox, crawls back under rock to wait for 8.42

[oliver]

I'm seeing some misinterpretations of AGP aperture and I figured I'd try to help people understand.

agp aperture is a 'window'
it does not use up your ram.
agp aperture allows the cpu to create a region of system memory addresses that map directly into video memory. I.E the system has 1gb of ram. The video card has 256mb of ram. the cpu can address (linearly) up to 4gb of ram. Thus agp sets up the address range from 1280Mb to 1560Mb as a 256mb map of addresses that are in reality the memory on the video card. This 'window' can be any logical size from 4mb on up to the limit of available extra addressing, based on power of 2 and 4k memory pages.
Your bios dictates what 'sizes' are available. If video memory is larger than the aperture, the agp code will page the window around (i.e adjust the mapping) to cover all of available video memory. it is ***this paging*** that appears broken in the fglrx driver when the card is pcie based, using the pcie to agp bridge. Thus the agp aperture must be = to video memory.

I've also found with my X1650Pro that the 512mb on board is actually split into two allocations of 256mb (one for each head) thus I have my agp aperture set to 256mb for the x1650pro, I have added videomem=256m to my kernel boot parameters, and set maxgart size in xorg.conf to 256mb.
The card works with these settings all in place for the new drivers, but ***never*** initializes agp mode - leavig the bus operating at *cough* PCI speeds and rendering large scale data transfers ridiculously slow. 3d yes - 2d yes - big performance jump from my trusty 9550 s**t no ... especially when playing WoW in wine. Or quake anything. Or sadly, even tuxracer.

/me hops down off soapbox, crawls back under rock to wait for 8.42

Alistair, you sure? lol your prob are, i'll go read some up on agpapparture size and what not.

I was under the impression, when it first was introduced, that agpapparture size was basically what you said, but the other way around. E.g. you have a videocard with 128videoram and 1gb system ram, by setting up agpapparture to, say 256ram your GPU would be able to use 256mb system ram +128 video ram for textures and what not. But since the whole agp->systemram path is quite 'slow' compared to onboard ram, it would only be recommended for systems with little videoram.

If what you saying is true, it would be now possible for the system to map agp memory as 'regular' ram? Or is it a 'trick' to allow the GPU to request memory via the conventional way, however using the videomemory region would basically use only the videoram? If that would be the case, you'd always want to put the agpapparture to videomem size and never want to change it, thus making the optop useless. I'm going to read up on this any maybe post again later

I'll join you there on your wait for those damned 8.42 drivers :S

Edit:

Ok I found a great article about it, and reading just the 2 first paragraphs answers the question:

The reason for writing this guide is that many people still ignore the importance of AAS or set it incorrectly. Generally measured in megabytes (MB), AAS is the amount of system memory (RAM) shared with an AGP graphics card in order for it to have more memory to process textures and other visual data.

http://www.tweak3d.net/joomla/features/hardware/agp-aperture-size-examined

read up and learn I'm gonna finish reading it and maybe i'll have to edit again but so far so good

Edit: Ok so that article is quite old and not as great as i thought but it does make some valid points. a nother article I found: http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/...ing/vidcard/43 claims nearly the same though:

First of all, AGP Aperture memory will not be used until your video card's on-board memory is running low. That means it will usually not impact your gaming performance because developers are trying hard to not exceed the on-board memory limits.

Now i'm willing to search for more, and find out more about it, but so far i'm getting the same overal, try to not use it, but don't set it to low, cause some things don't work if it's set to low, For me, atm it seems half the video ram or more then 32mb is good.

"Setting the Aperture Size to too small values could result in running out of available texture memory especially on a low-mem video card. It is also possible that developers make use of the GART's features by creating textures as 'non-local'." Might btw the reason I was having issues with AGP ram set to 128 (or lower) I think some of the 2d Acceleration works by using non-local gart and so it was flippin' out. How to determine however what the minimum required setting per card is is a mystery to me for now, I still feel half video ram is the sweetspot.