Re: [Dri-users] Questions about ATI Radeon 8500 support in XF86/DRI on FreeBSD

[Stefan L. <hoi...@gm...>]

Andrew J Caines wrote:
> Stefan,
> 
> Thanks for your response.
> 

no problem ;-)


[...]

> Given the my old PC (PII-266 on 440 LX mobo - 66MHz PCI bus?), how
> much of the video card's potential speed will be limited by my bus
> and/or CPU?

Hmm, that will certainly depend a lot on the actual application or 
benchmark. Some apps, that don't use a lot of CPU power shouldn't be 
affected too hard, whereas CPU-limited apps will, naturally. You 
shouldn't expect brandnew 3D games to run very well, as they'll need 
both a fast CPU and a fast graphics card. I suppose you can run Quake3 
OK with some limitations, but that's about it.

For comparison: I used to have a K6-2/400 running at 6x66MHz (which 
should be roughly comparable to your PII-266) with a Voodoo3 PCI, and 
with already with that slow graphics card games like Q3A were CPU-limited.

About bus-speed: I'm a bit confused here. PCI usually runs at 33MHz. Or 
are you talking about AGP (which runs at 66MHz). If your mobo does have 
an AGP slot, you shouldn't see any speed problems there. I noticed very 
little performance difference between AGP 1x and AGP 4x on my system at 
least. If you've only got a PCI-slot, you'll definitely get slowdowns 
due to limited bus speed. Also I don't know if any PCI 8500 cards are 
available at all.

> 
> 
>> NB: there's also cards out there called "9100", these are
>> completely the same as the 8500 cards, except for a different BIOS
> 
> 
> Funny - This isn't on ATI's site and googling for "ATI Radeon 9100"
> turns up hits in almost all non-english european languages. Does this
> card have a limited release?
> 

hmm, maybe, dunno

> What would a 9100 offer over the 8x00s?
> 

The MS-Windows drivers will enable a special feature on the 9100-cards, 
that uses the shader units of the R200 to postprocess MPEG-video, AFAIK

> 
>> About 3rd party manufacturers:
> 
> 
> Thanks for the detailed breakdown.
> 
> 
> 
>> I'd go for the 8500 64MB (should be the faster of the two), as
>> you'll probably never need the 128MB memory anyway.
> 
> 
> Given that I'm going from a 4MB card, I didn't think I'd notice, but
> I don't know enough about how the cards work to be sure.
> 

Well, the onboard memory is the place where the application's textures 
are stored. If you know that you'll be using apps that will use _huge_ 
amounts of textures, you might end up better with the 128MB version. 64 
MB should be plenty, though, at least at the moment, and in the 
not-so-distant future.

> 
> 
>>> Will DRI in XFree86 4.2.1 work with the 8500? Will there be a
>>> differnece in support in 4.3?
>> 
>> I don't have any BSD, but here's the situation for linux: -4.2.1:
>> basic 2D works, XV might be broken (don't remember exactly), DRI 
>> not included yet -4.3.0: both 2D and 3D should work fine
> 
> 
> It looks like XFree86 4.3 should be in the FreeBSD ports sometime
> soon, so I can be a little patient.
> 
> 
> -Andrew-