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10.3: Possibly make older video cards functional again
Authored by: cydeout on Nov 07, '03 11:12:52AM

I have the same system, a 1600SW, Panther, and Proformance 3 running on a G4/400. This card really sucks. In OS 9, it constanstly crashed the entire machine (I do have the last drivers installed). In Jaguar, the OS was able to run it, but it seemed like it ran without OpenGL - refreshing was terrible. Usable, but terrible. The great thing about OS X is that I was able to use the monitor and it would never crash. In Pather, the monitor didn't work for obvious reasons.

Funny thing is, now that the computer only runs my second monitor (with an original Mac Radeon card), OpenGL is MUCH faster. Before, the refreshing problems on the SGI seemed to translate over to the Radeon monitor too. (i.e. - the flurry screensaver was never smooth when I ran dual monitors under Jaguar. In Panther, running only on the Radeon card now, it's beautiful and smooth.) I originally thought that it was because the Radeon card was pretty old. But now, I'm wondering if Proformance card causes the OS to misbehave - perhaps why that's Apple prevented non-modern cards from being used?

Anyone have similar experiences with this card and can give any tips? TIA!



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10.3: Possibly make older video cards functional again
Authored by: cydeout on Nov 12, '03 11:48:27AM

I've successfully used this hack to force Panther to run my SGI monitor.

NOTE: this hack does come with a steep price in performance, as it appears (I can't prove it, but this is my observation) to disable Quartz or OpenGL on ALL monitors. That, or extra CPU cycles are needed to run the non-OpenGL card.

One of the benefits that I saw on my machine before I ran this hack was a substancial increase in speed while Panther only ran my original Radeon Mac card. Quartz was used beautifully in screensavers, etc. Since I've never used that card by itself with any 10.x system, I always had a problem with Quartz running slow. I always thought it was because my G4/400 was just ancient.

However, Panther ran beautifully on that card alone, and once I used the hack, Quartz or OpenGL is gone from both monitors/cards. The screensaver example I gave above is back to its old self of not being able to render things smoothly.



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