ATI Radeon 9250 PCI cards, converting from 64-bit to 128-bit and other details

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@herd that's really cool, thanks! I've gotten a lot of good video card info from VOGONS. It's a great resource.

An eBay seller offered me a good price on a PCI Radeon 9200 SE. I haven't gone for it (yet). Based on the little research I've done, I expect the 9200 SE will have a device ID of 0x5964, which I don't think is supported by Mac OS at all. The 9200 and 9250 are 0x5961 and 0x5960 respectively. The different device ID is why the 9250 required a modified extension for OS 9 acceleration.

Does anyone know whether the device ID on these cards is set by the ROM? I've seen that on other ATI cards, for example a Radeon 9800 Non-Pro. Its device ID is 0x4E49, but if you flash it with a 9800 Pro ROM, it becomes 0x4E48 and is identical to a 9800 Pro in every way.

Maybe I should do a little experimenting with the device ID on the 9250 before jumping on the 9200 SE.

 

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I had some time last night so I tried changing the device ID in the ROM to 0x5964 on a card that would otherwise be 0x5960. This was the result (viewed with an NVIDIA AGP card):


As one might expect, it didn't work. My conclusion is either that 0x5960 is set in the hardware in a way I don't understand, or I just don't know what I'm doing.

I also checked the Radeon 8500 kext in Leopard and it supports 0x5960, 0x5961, 0x5962, and 0x5963, but not 0x5964. So a Radeon 9200 SE is a card that would need a modified ROM and modified drivers in both OS 9 and OS X. Since regular 9200s and 9250s already exist in the roughly the same price range with the same or better performance, my conclusion is that a 9200 SE is not worth my time. A determined person could make one work, though.