ATI/AMD 5xxx 6xxx 7xxx 2xx 3xx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

[bobthemunk]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

Hi all, I'm currently going through the known quantities of the Frame buffers as well on my Sapphire 6870 1GB.

Other hardware:
GA-Z68XP-UD3
i7-2600k
WD Caviar Blue HDD

With no buffer, will not boot into OS X, hangs after the Apple screen with the spinning wheel. GE=Yes will of course be on for all of these tests.

Duckweed Appears to be the best, most consistent option in my experience. It is the native FrameBuffer for Unibeast and performs the best so far (not after waking from sleep though, that's a different problem altogether...).

Gibba boots well and will run Starcraft and Final Cut pro 2, but leads to very mixed performance. The most obnoxious part about this Frame Buffer is how widely varied it is. Some days, there will be no crashes whatsoever and all is well. Others, I'll get a random grey screen of death at any moment or a Bad Access Kernel Failure. However, it does seem to be the best option in terms of reliability for booting and performance, with the risk of a system or game crash.

Bulrushes is a mixed bag. When moving the mouse, the entire system lags every 5 to 10 seconds, making it extremely obnoxious to use. SC 2 had great framerate though at around 60 fps in the menu alone. However, it couldn't reach games consistently and would crash from a Kernel Access failure. Also grey screened when restarting.

Hydrilla, Elodea, Juncus have similar results as Bulrushes; laggy mouse, poor fps, SC 2 crash.

Cattail, Pithecia, Fanwort, Kudzu, Lotus, Ipomoea, Muskgrass, and Osmunda lead to no monitor signal. Suggest avoiding.

Any suggestions as to where to go from here?

Final thoughts: I don't know. Nothing seemed to be any better than the Duckweed or Gibba options, but neither are getting me where I want to go right now. Tony or anyone knowledgeable, what configuration does Unibeast use when it boots into the Mac partition of the hard drive? That seems to be relatively stable and offers consistent performance?

 

[bobthemunk]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

So basically, any answer about the Frame buffer used in Unibeast would be the best info to get right now. It appears to be the best performing as well as the most stable solution for me currently.

Is there any definitive answer about how booting into the HDD using the Unibeast USB controls the graphics driver?

Edit: after some digging, I rediscovered that apparently the default Buffer is Duckweed. For whatever reason, loading up Duckweed a second time allows it to run quite well. Not sure why, but it seems pretty decent.

 

[inc]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

If I'm reading this correctly, this is all signs of not working correctly for my Sapphire 6870:

I have a 4-port model that should be Duckweed:

[ DVI ] [ hdmi ] [ dp ]
[ DVI ]


| | | | +-o ATI6000Controller <class ATI6000Controller, id 0x1000003de, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 4>
| | | | | +-o ATIFramebufferNI <class ATIFramebuffer, id 0x1000003f6, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (4 ms), retain 16>
| | | | | +-o ATIFramebufferNI <class ATIFramebuffer, id 0x1000003fc, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (3 ms), retain 16>
| | | | | +-o ATIFramebufferNI <class ATIFramebuffer, id 0x100000402, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (2 ms), retain 14>
| | | | | +-o ATIFramebufferNI <class ATIFramebuffer, id 0x100000408, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (2 ms), retain 14>
| | | | +-o ATISupport <class ATISupport, id 0x1000003df, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (0 ms), retain 4>
| | | | +-o ATIRadeonX3000 <class ATIRadeonX3000, id 0x1000003e1, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (2 ms), retain 42>
| | | | +-o ATIR8002DContext <class ATIR8002DContext, id 0x100000523, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 5>
| | | | +-o ATIR8002DContext <class ATIR8002DContext, id 0x100000525, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 5>
| | | | +-o ATIR8002DContext <class ATIR8002DContext, id 0x100000527, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0, retain 5>

· % kextstat|grep ATI
76 2 0xffffff7f80d89000 0x18a000 0x18a000 com.apple.kext.ATISupport (7.1.8) <74 9 8 7 5 4 3 1>
77 0 0xffffff7f80f13000 0x43000 0x43000 com.apple.kext.ATI6000Controller (7.1.8) <76 74 9 8 5 4 3 1>
93 0 0xffffff7f81063000 0x297000 0x297000 com.apple.ATIRadeonX3000 (7.1.8) <78 74 9 7 6 5 4 3 1>
106 0 0xffffff7f815dc000 0x12000 0x12000 com.apple.kext.ATIFramebuffer (7.1.8) <76 74 9 8 7 5 4 3 1>

Any advice on next steps would be great.

 

[smg669]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

Hi all, I'm currently going through the known quantities of the Frame buffers as well on my Sapphire 6870 1GB.

Other hardware:
GA-Z68XP-UD3
i7-2600k
WD Caviar Blue HDD

With no buffer, will not boot into OS X, hangs after the Apple screen with the spinning wheel. GE=Yes will of course be on for all of these tests.

Duckweed Appears to be the best, most consistent option in my experience. It is the native FrameBuffer for Unibeast and performs the best so far (not after waking from sleep though, that's a different problem altogether...).

Bob -

I've got an identical setup. Do you have one monitor or two? I've got one monitor running from the top DVI to a DVI port and a second monitor going from the HDMI port to a DVI inout using a HDMI->DVI cable.

The only way i can get the 2nd monitor to show up via the HDMI->DVI cable is using Bulrushes. However, like you, I get constant lags/mouse freezes (like when the Applications menu pops up or when the Top Sites page loads in Safari).

If I use Duckweed I can boot up fine to a single monitor on the DVI port. As soon as I hook up the monitor to the HDMI port, the DVI monitor becomes Monitor 2 (i.e. no menu or dock) and the monitor hooked up to the HDMI port goes black and then goes into power save mode. Any thoughts on this mess? Would really like to get my two monitors happening reliably.

 

[bobthemunk]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

smg, I'm currently only running a 1 monitor setup, but would like to go for 2 in the not too distant future. Unfortunately, I don't have any wisdom regarding the setup so hopefully, someone more knowledgable than us will chime in!

 

[inc]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

You'll need to create a custom personality or persuade someone that has created one for your exact Make/Model to be generous enough to share theirs.

 

[mantips]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

What does it take to create a new personality? Is there any reading I can do to gain detailed understanding of what a "personality" is and how i might create/modify one for my specific card?

 

[inc]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

Best resource I've ever had is Alex Martinez's thread:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index. ... omsearch=1

 

[mahdi0]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

one thing i've noticed,

you need to have GE=yes in order for the frame buffer personalities to load (unlike the suggestion in the first post).

my sapphire 6850 card, I can't get dual dvi to work with GE=yes(duckweed, gibba, and some others), however I can with GE=no. With just GE=no I get profiler to see the card as 6xxx instead of 6850. is that cool?

performance seems the same. it's all good rolling with no frame buffer personality?

 

[randycatanach]

Re: ATI/AMD 5xxx & 6xxx Graphics Cards Framebuffer Personalities

you need to have GE=yes in order for the frame buffer personalities to load (unlike the suggestion in the first post).

The first post is suggesting GE=No as a separate personality, not suggesting to set as no, then try to load a personality with an actual name. In order to load any of the named personalities, GE must = Yes.

With just GE=no I get profiler to see the card as 6xxx instead of 6850. is that cool?

performance seems the same. it's all good rolling with no frame buffer personality?

DVD Player and several other apps most likely won't work.

I have the Gigabyte 6850 and Bulrushes has been working well for me with "AtiPorts=4". I don't know if the same will work for your card.