Power Macintosh 9600 and ATI Radeon 9200

[604ev]

Would love to hear any further thoughts you or anyone else might have. 

Hello,

In any PM 9600 config, SCSI card (or SCSi-like) should be in A1 (faster card in top slot, and then) ; according to me your config should look like this :

A1 : ACARD 6880

B1 : Empty [suitable for Firewire] [or USB if nothing in C1]

C1 : Empty [suitable for USB if Firewire in B1]

D2 : Ethernet (in certain circumstances [OS X, intensive networking], Ethernet cards work best when they have priority over Video card here in E2 [when they are in top slot of bottom controller]) [Asante cards should always be there in D2 (OS9, OSX)

E2 : IX Micro Video card or any ATI video card

F2 : Empty [suitable for nothing : leaves room for optionnal HDD]

and yes, the 9600 Graphics accelerator is the card's driver

Edit :

And unless you need DVI, a Rage 128 is fine

 

[Cory5412]

The only problem I have with the card is that there appears to be a redraw of windows as I windows move from foreground to background and the like

Did anybody say this yet. That didn't go away, with any graphics card at all, until the switch to Mac OS X. This is a problem with the OS, not your graphics card.

Newer graphics cards might do it a little faster, but in my experience: it's not much faster.

I have seen this happen with Rage128s on blue-and-white G3s and Pismos, as well as a Radeon 9000 in a TiBook, and whatever card is in the QS'02@800 I use as an ASIP server.

There is no solution to the slowness of Classic Mac OS at redrawing background information.

 

[Alex]

604e thanks a million for the schematic. I've been so busy I haven't yet tried to apply your suggestion, I will as soon as I have a little free time.

Cory, thanks for the experiential note, you may be right. What I can say is that tabbed folders (those that rest at the bottom of the screen) scroll very smoothly only when the 9600 specific graphics extension is enabled. I really appreciate the note.

 

[Cory5412]

Curious about the tabbed folders, and I should really pull out one of my Macs and poke at this on my own. When you say scrolling, do you mean once you open the tabbed folder, and start scrolling the contents, or do you mean the actual act of popping open the tab?

And, are you talking about opening the tabbed folder once you are already in Finder, or switching to Finder from another application?

In general, scrolling can be smooth and I believe that's something that was added in 8 or 9 somewhere along the way, but they never fixed the other issues with switching between applications.

If scrolling is smooth using the stock video card, that's generally as much as you can ask for until you start wanting games, perhaps Photoshop or OS X.

 

[Alex]

Hi Cory

Tabbed folders, as in the example screenshot, it shows three folders all attached to the base of the desktop, one of which has its contents in view. Perhaps I wasn't clear; if the 9600 graphics accelerator extension is not loaded on startup, the tabbed folders continue to work as expected but when clicked, to reveal their contents, the animation of the tabbed folder sliding up to reveal its contents suffers (jittery animation without extension loaded).





The only real issue, even with the extension loaded, is a slow redraw (not very slow, just noticeable by today's standards, I might be spoiled with current Mac OS). The redraw concerns overlapping windows. So if click on a Finder which is behind another window it will force the now visible portion of the window to redraw itself and it's just a tad slower but I think that after testing it might be normal.

I just came back from vacation 2 days ago so I will try to swap the card to another slot as recommended by @604ev, I think he is on to something interesting when it comes to arranging cards in the 9600 to accommodate the two controllers on the main logic board that handle PCI, I think his recommendation helps to balance PCI I/O load more evenly. I am absolutely going to do this and report back.

Overall, I accept that this is a very old Mac and I think I am mostly dealing with being too optimistic on expectations when it comes to 2D performance on this Mac and video card.

Thanks

—Alex

 

[Cory5412]

Thank you for clarifying.

It seems like the tabbed folders might be under the same restriction everything else on the system is: They aren't rendered when they aren't visible and Classic Mac OS is bad at catching up with that quickly. The graphics acceleration extensions help a little bit, but I doubt you're going to see this speed up much under any newer graphics card.

Unfortunately: I don't think it'll get much better.

Balancing the i/o between the two controllers makes perfect sense, although I'll admit the fact that we just straight-up know what order is best is hilarious to me, in the sense that.... it just strikes me that there's such a standardized set of upgrades for the 6-slot PowerMacs, and that those upgrades are largely optimized to making them usable at what people wanted to do in the early 2000s, including OS X upgrades.