MacOS 8-9-rhapsody G4 compatible with PC PCI Radeon 9100. Multiple graphic card switch possible in OS9 or O.F.?

[vexatious]

Sawtooth G4 AGP

MDD dual 867Mhz

Powerbook Ti DVI (mobility 7000)

Anyone try a PC Radeon 9100 PCI with MacOS 8-9-rhapsody?

Radeon 9100 PCI for pc is essentially a Radeon 8500 on PCI and slightly lower frequency.  It's uncommon and somewhat unpopular. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-9100-pci.c805https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-9100-pci.c805.  I hope the ATI MacOS 8-9 system extensions work transparently...

Is there a way to override the primary display card through open firmware or other means?  E.g. if I have a Rage 128 AGP & Rage 128 PCI, how do I truncate the AGP and startup MacOS 8-9-rhapsody with the PCI card?  I know this works on Linux by editing xorg.conf, but not sure about open firmware and/or MacOS...

Thanks

 

[Cory5412]

To answer the second part of this: In general, if you have a PCI video card installed, but not an AGP one, it should just use the PCI video card. You can set your "primary" monitor in the OS to any monitor connected to any card that the system recognizes.

For the first part of your question: There are PCI-based Radeon Mac Edition and Radeon 7000 cards that should work in Mac PCI slots as well, they're somewhat common as upgrades for older PCI based PowerMacs. I don't know about the 9100 in particular, though.

In general, there are Mac-specific versions of these cards, so it's basically up to whether anybody made a firmware for it.

 

[Franklinstein]

A number of PC ATI video cards will work in a Mac but often you'll need to move a resistor or two and flash it to a Mac firmware. The Mac Elite wikidownloads2 page has a pretty good listing of cards that are hackable but you'll likely need a PC to do the flashing.

For video card functionality on a Mac, it depends on which model: if it has built-in video and you install a NuBus or PCI card, the Mac will go to whichever device has something plugged into it, so if you have two displays connected, your onboard video will run as your main screen by default; the secondary card should come up once the desktop loads, but it won't be your primary display. If nothing is plugged into either card at boot time (such as it may be with an old unpowered display switcher), it will default to onboard video regardless.

If you're using a Mac with expansion card-based video and add a second video card, I believe the Mac defaults to whichever one is first in the PCI slot order (so a card in slot A1 would load before one in B2). AGP would always be the primary display.

 

[Cory5412]

AGP would always be the primary display.

What's "primary" in this context? I may need to pull out a display and poke at this, because on OS X, you can set your "primary" display (the one that has your dock and menubar) to be any monitor you want, connected to any GPU you want. In a PowerMac context, this would include a PCI card, even if you had an AGP one.

I presume, but perhaps falsely, that Classic Mac OS would do the same.

 

[vexatious]

Thanks for the responses.  Very helpful!