Is the ATI FireGL 8800 worth getting for Retro Gaming as a cheap Radeon 8500?
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- Опубліковано 28 жов 2024
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Aww.. Now that you've started, we need to see some dual-Tualatin and Athlon MP dual motherboard reviews ,3
I doubt it. I am only interested in some aspects, mostly to save a penny. What you mentioned is super expensive and there are others that have a real interest in those sort of machines.
I like those screensavers, particularly the tunnel one. They look like scenes from demos. Another great video, Phil. I never had a Radeon 8xxx card of any sort but I had a couple of 9200s. Didn't get much use, though.
This video is worth putting out, haven't seen allot of people put this type of concept on gaming.
Being someone who uses Quadro cards for gaming daily I like their stability and for retro hardly no one knows anything about them making them really cheap.
Radeon 8500 was my favorite card :) I can remember reading all new Direct3d 8.1 fuctions :) Good old times ...
GeForce 4 Ti was not full DX8.1 card i think was only shader model 1.3 suport but Radeon 8500 was 1.4 compatible :)
@lRaziel1 gt21 I can run kingkong decently
You can actually modify driver's .inf files and use generic radeon 8500 drivers for firegl 8800. You just have to note down device id's, copy all radeon 8500 sections of the .inf files, and replace everywhere device id with FireGL 8800 device id. Then Windows will detect FireGL 8800 as an regular 8500, providing everything that standard 8500 has. I've did that in the past years back and it worked just fine. You could also use custom drivers pack like Omega Drivers or sth.
Whats interesting about the R200 cards, was the fact they featured an early form of tessellation that ATI dubbed "TRUForm". Games either compatible with the feature out of the box, or could be modded to use it, would show more rounded models for both characters and the game world
Also, love your new benchmark graphs. Almost has that TRON style to it, and just how glowy and neon it is appeals to the 80s kid in me! =D
Yes, I tried this out just last night. An older driver is required and you have to enable TruForm in the driver, but then it works.
Yeah, but it's such a neat feature though! Was surprised an awesome RPG I played during my early college days in 2003 (Neverwinter Nights) even featured it. Hell, even UT99 had a patch for it.
It was buggy and, for example, turned cubes in Serious Sam into pillows
What do you think about retro gaming on old workstation cards?
Good, retro, and kinda slow :D
the quadros you have shown are pretty decent so yeh
this card perfectly fits to build extremely expensive 2002 ultimate workstation with the very first p4 3.06ghz cpu and the worlds first dual dvd-rw sony dru-500
I always found them lacking compared to the gaming centric cards at the time. I always had workstation cards in my systems which I used to also play the occasional game on.
The Fire GL 8700 & 8800 were unusual in that they were AGP not AGP Pro, the AGP Pro cards were better at Open GL I think, but you need a motherboard with an AGP Pro slot to use them. Which isnt hard these days but back then they were stupid expensive.
Yes I had the 8700 before the 8800 because it was cheaper, I upgraded for a ton of cash and found the differences were not worth the upgrade, it took quite a while the pay for that card. as I remember i upgraded it in the winter time which was slower business wise for me at the time.
I had my 8800 in a P4 3.06 HT system (SL6S5 S-Spec) on an MSI board, it was soon speed wise with the 800FSB CPUs but it was one hell of a system and cost the earth.
At the same time I had a dual P3-S with a Fire GL X1 256P card which was only slightly slower than the P4 in multi tasking, the P4 romped away in any single threaded programs though.
Ill never forget my P4 3.06HT, It was one of the few single CPU systems I ever had and lasted all the way until my first dual CPU quad core Xeon system. (Clovertown X5365)
Another tool I used to use back in the Radeon 9800 Pro days: ATI Tray Tool. It exposes all sorts of hidden driver options.
Yes that's a great tool, I use it quite a bit.
Thank you. It was an eye candy. 9550 is the best, but I paired it with GeForce 2mx because of resident evil 1.^^* Because of games, movies also I rated them again. The movies were absurdly underated. storyline with Alice was actually integrated through whole series.^^❤️
My old 8500 had a thermal take crystal heatsink thermally glued on in the end. It ran an early sample vbios with tighter memory timings and would run 315/315. Got me into overclocking :)
25:00 i love how that benchmark looks!! great video!
you are getting close to the time when the custom gaming PC's started to get popular, maybe you could find an old fully loaded alienware and see how it would compare with more common configs? might be interesting.
A workstation card that has trouble with OpenGL? I certainly wasn't expecting that.
you should try "Enable texture compression" for OpenGL games. 8500 uses it by default in Q3 and other OpenGL games.
Very thorough and interesting... not an AMD video card guy, but I enjoyed all of your efforts in this video!
Thank you! I was hoping it would work right away, but I ran into lots of issues. So best to document it and hopefully someone out there can find a solution.
Adblock off.
Auto play on.
I have 12 computers. (Crappy old ones)
Time to binge.
Thanks for the upload Phil! I'll have a look in the drivers later today, perhaps a bit of INF fun would do if we're lucky, Playing with the bios update you used might also be an option, especially if you have more than one of them hehehe
I looked at the old threads for modding the 8500 to FireGL, and they also HEX edited some DLL files. So it wasn't straight forward, definitely above my pay grade :D
Oh I see, probably out of mine as well then, or knowledge for that matter hehehe
I've played around with the INF, INI and DAT files, added the fireGL 8800 ID, in theory, it "should" install without doing it manually, if it actually works, it should show up as Radeon 8500
drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz08z1XVRQVucW01bVBoYm43U1k/view?usp=sharing
Edit: removed BIOS stuff because I read the other thread down there.
(Sidenote: your eeprom programmer doesnt read that chip I guess ? (might not even be eeprom anyway)
Edit2: I've had a play with the BIOS file, indeed no ID in there. I can manage to make it readable in radedit, but I get a bad CRC, at least frequency read from the file are alright
I still have hope that since they had to edit DLLs to make the fireGL work, you shouldn't have to, since that's the Radeon we want and they had to edit for the other way around, if I'm making any sense...
My FireGL 8800 I pulled out of one of those HP WX4000 workstations a few years ago, which I think probably is where most of them for sale came from. I used it for my Tualatin W98 system back then with a pair of voodoo 2's which I found to be a very nice match up because of the strong 2D performance and strong DirectX. I do recall having problems with OpenGL but I never messed with it to be honest. It is interesting though that the FireGL8800 is considered to be a Radeon 8800 which is an 8500 with modified OpenGL hardware, supposedly with drivers being optimized for OpenGL more so than the 8500. HP drivers tend to be the ones originally available when the computer shipped, rarely if ever updated on their site unless there was a serious problem, and given ATI's history of driver issues, I'd bet a newer driver specific for the 8800 would yield better performance. Trick is finding newer driver versions... Dell might be another place to look as they tend to have more driver updates.
IBM also used them it seems, but I didn't have much luck finding anything much newer. So it's either using the older HP drivers and most things work, but slower, or the latest Catalyst and you have a decent D3D card, but no OpenGl. I tried hard to make it work, but sometimes things don't work out and it's best to move on.
Could you flash the 8800 with the 8500 bios then use the 8500 drivers ?
@philscomputerlab Can you share the link of the quadro review you did? was it a quadro fx3000 ? or what model was it, i can´t find it
It was a Quadro2 Pro. ua-cam.com/video/ku9Cp3o13QI/v-deo.html
Just wondering about the accent, love the videos, new subscriber, nice seeing videos on things from my generation :) but I can't place your accent, I hear NewZealand, Australian, German, anyone?
Regarding workstation cards: The Nvidia Quadro 2000 is really good for mid-late XP games. Runs them on the highest settngs (except Crysis of course!). And the image quality is awesome as well as low power consumption (compaired to the GTX 450)
My old IBM Thinkpad Z61p laptop from 2006 has a FireGL 5200 256MB Mobility card, and this is sold as a multimedia workstation for CAD etc. Must have been quite powerful for the time, but struggles a little with current modern video standards.
Two things worth a shot, have you tried reflashing the firmware to a ATI 8500 , or the Omega Drivers?
Yes, flashing doesn't work as the PCI device ID comes from another chip. Omega Driver, DNA drivers, I tried them with no success.
I meant force it to flash, either with a hardware programmer (its the 8pin chip in the top left of the board) or via software
What I meant was, yes you can flash it. But the device ID is not read from the BIOS, but from another chip. So all it does is change the clocks and the name it shows up in device manager, but it doesn't fool the drivers which probe for the device ID in that other chip. Usually you can change the device ID by moving some SMD resistors around, this works with Radeon 9700 cards. But none of this is documented for the FireGL 8800.
makes sense :)
Any tips or ideas to fix the OpenGL issues I encountered?
I dont think there were any fixes. You have to remember nobody ever bought these cards, the Radeon cards were always a lot cheaper to buy and were better supported in games.
Im surprised you went with the 8800, there was no Win98 support then and I dont think that ever changed. Im looking for a card over an ATi 128 Pro that I can put into a Win98 system that is stupid cheap but cant decide on a card... might go with an 8500 because its got 98 supported drivers.
I have more Omega drivers back from the time, If you could try another (the last are rad_w2kxp_omega_38291 from 2006, then my softmodded R9500@R9700 died). Looking into the inf file it is interesting, that the section "ati2mtag_R200GL" doesn't copy ati2mtag.OpenGL as for the other cards. So I would try to force the fireGL8800 entry to use the "ati2mtag_R200" section not the R200GL one. Something like "ATI FireGL 8800 (Omega 3.8.291)" = ati2mtag_R200, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5148 but maybe the cardID is further encoded somewhere in the opengl dlls :(
Yes when they modded the 8500 into FireGL, they did make HEX edit changes to some DLL files. I ran out of time, and hoping someone else can have a go and figure it out. Or if there is a tool to fake PC device ID, like RivaTuner can do with Nvidia cards.
Thanks I got those latest Omega drivers. The install fine, but even D3D doesn't work with them. How odd. But at least you reminded me of these Omega drivers, I remember using them in the old days and really liking ATI Tray Tools.
I had a later variant PCI32 version of a fire 8xxx mid range series from some smaller Tawainese vendor using new/end stock. Had 192MiB dedicated memory and could utilise up to total combined with sys RAM ~700-800MiB.
It was shit for 3D FPS/3PS games like Quake, Turok and Blood 2 though was decent for RTS like C&C, Red Alert, KKnD and isometeic games like Gender Wars and Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines.
All in 1024*768 at 60-90 FPS w/ minimal dips.
Was using an Athlon 64 3x series w/ 256MB RAM & Win XP SP 1-2 and linux debian 3x kernel when possible.
Aside from my dissatisfaction with the video, the card is surprisingly fast for its specs. You can actually play games in 1080p on it!
Hard to call it a "bargain", few years ago I've bought radeon 9100 (technically the same card), for around 2,5$ ;)
Good for you, prices have certainly changed. The 8500 LE is lesser and not worth as much, so that's something to keep in mind. The project didn't turn out how I hoped, but I'm sure someone will find value in it.
3:35 The radeon 8500 had 8/4 ROPs/TMUs, 4 Pixel and 2 vertex shaders.
The results from the benchmark confirm it is the same chip, but GPU-Z is reporting wrong specs.
It's the best card for rares (too rares) truform games.
Half Life and Morrowind were beautiful with this option, really!
Thanks for the video Phil, really like your content. Question: Are you German? Thx
Thanks! No I'm not.
Are any other FireGL cards worth checking out?
I cant really think of any. the 8700 was a lower version of the 8800, I had a Fire GL 4 but that was not a gaming card. I dont have it any more, I dont think it had D£D support only Open GL at which it was a monster. The Fire GL X1 was another monster card but its AGP Pro, the Z1 was the 4x/8x AGP version, that was the last Fire GL card I owned but it was on XP and didnt make it over to my next computer because it had PCIe slots.
simFUSION 6000 ;)
The 8700 driver actually works on the 8800. It's a tiny bit older than the HP 8800 driver, performs pretty much the same, working OGL, but slow, and driver bug in Evolva.
SimFUSION 6500q looks promising too :-) And Phils talk about availability and price of these cards at ebay would be funny ..... ;-)
vgamuseum.ru/gpu/atiamd/evans-sutherland-simfusion-6500q-quad-ati-radeon-9800xt/
indeed ;) And as long as the question was just about being worth checking out and not about being cheap and easy to get, I think these cards would be a shiny suggestion ;)
the old trick to get ogl to work, is to pull the ogl files from a driver that has them/has them working, and dropping them into the driver you found that works best for d3d, install, shockingly, this was true for rage128/fury/etc cards, and you can actually just mod the bios id and reflash the card, the other option, edit the inf file, adding the firegl cards ID, inf file mods are simple, literal copy-pasta, its also how you get hybrid drivers that take ogl from for example the firegl driver, and add it to the latest radeon driver, and gain both, though, i remember the drivers being very spotty some having ogl some not, and, they expected you would just upgrade in place to keep ogl working....very absurd if you ask me... it got better over time though....(with later cards)
I am curious if you were able to find out how to modify the Win9X and WinXP drivers for AMD video cards. I would love to get my old Dell Precision M4600 (FirePro M5100) and Dell Precision M6600 (FirePro M6100) to be old Windows XP gaming laptops.
Are 8500 normally expensive then? I thought everyone wanted nVidia for this time period. I just bought a 128mb 8500 for £11.50. It works great.
Install Catalyst 4.9 driver - it was the best for my broken Radeon 9200 SE - it should work good too with FireGL
here in Russia the firegl variants are much less common and several times more expensive
another awesome video.
As a matter of interest Phil, in your search did you manage to find a WIndows 98 compatible driver that would allow you to run the 8800?
I used Windows XP for this project.
So you never considered a Win98 driver?
No worries Ill be looking myself in a few weeks once I get my latest system nailed down. still trying to chose the CPU for it... Slot 1 Pentium III 100Mhz FSB, cant decide what CPU to buy on ebay for it though. Ill need two as its based on a SuperMicro P6DGU motherboard, that will run W2k but Win98 will just ignore the extra CPU when I install it.
No, I really don't see this as a Windows 98 GPU. I know people love to "max out" Windows 98, but it's not something I'm that interested in. For me Windows 98 gaming has more to do with things like Glide or A3D and here much older parts are the way to go.
Windows 98,Glide and A3D that's what I call class!
PLEASE get the ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
I LOVED this card. Should still have it in my basement somewhere.
i had one as a kid and then i sold it, thats the fucking idiot i am :)
The 8500 was garbage! I agree, get a Radeon 9700 Pro! I bought a Radeon 9700 Pro a few weeks after its launch, and it was the single biggest upgrade to my video I have EVER done! I had a GeForce2 MX 400 and a Voodoo 5 before the Radeon 9700 Pro! For retro gaming on Windows XP/2000/ME/98, the Radeon 9700 Pro is super powerful and has great support for a massive range of APIs (DX7-9, OpenGL)!
The DirectX 8 support was a bit spotty on release because the card was a designed by ArtX and not the same team who designed the 8000 series, but the drivers VERY quickly came around!
If you want to do retro 3D gaming for ANYTHING older (meaning Glide games), you get a Voodoo 3-4-5 if possible (I know, those are stupid expensive now!) as a nVidia or ATI simply does not make sense when so many older games supported and optimized for Glide! I'll take Quake 3 and 40fps on a Voodoo 5 with Glide over the 80fps I got on my GeForce MX 400 ANY day because of the superior image quality and somehow smoother gameplay vs nVidia OpenGL! The latency and response of Glide games always felt faster and snappier than their OpenGL/DirectX counterparts (same maybe Unreal Tournament or a really hacked up version of Unreal with high-res texture OpenGL).
My Athlon 2000+ with 512MBs of ram and my Radeon 9700 Pro was great for soooo many older titles of the Windows era plus then (2002) current titles. I got a solid 5 years of gaming out of that 9700 Pro and would have gotten more, but I had OCed the RAM to increase performance and I think the RAM eventually died.
Anything newer then 2002 retro wise can normally still be played on a current generation PC if you know what you are doing.
also the 9600 Pro (256mb card) if you can that card i really enjoyed back in the day.
+wakesake:
I have a ATI Radeon 9500 and with a special driver, it would enable the4 or so other pipelines and it ran like a 9700. That was one beefy card (very fast) for its time.
nice video!
Thank you! Means a lot, this one took me quite a long time, several days worth of playing around with it.
I remember testing one of this cards borrowed from work, and while DirectX performance was fine, and you could play games quite well, games based on OpenGL didn't work at all. Maybe there was a workaround, but didn't bother much to test it.
That's pretty much what I encountered.
For my retro-gaming needs, I use a Geforce GT730 that has drivers for Windows XP and very good performance for games of the XP era.
Oddly enough my built by ATI 8500LE also had 3.3NS ram. I wish so badly I still had my tests for this card back in the day but sadly with time things get lost.
Wish you had a normal 8500 instead of AIW to test with. But at least its not the 8500DV which was underclocked due to its firewire port onboard.
The AIW 8500 has the same specifications as the 8500. Like you say, it's the 8500DV that got gimped. 3.3ns RAM on your 8500 LE means it would have been good for at least 300 MHz without going over spec.
Your videos remind me just how oddball that 8500LE 128MB actually was. Lets release a full feature card with nothing disabled except maybe the DVI port for 2/3rd the price.
Your videos make me wish I had everyone of my PCs back from my 486 up.
I got a 9100 today from eBay Germany. It's the re-release of the 8500 LE :) Comes with 4ns RAM, so not much OC there.
Does it have Ball grid array solder memory? I remember back in the day there being some big deal about video cards having it and the fact that the LE had it was even crazier. Not actually sure what if any good it did.
Another video by mr Phil, I'm the guy with no money, athlon xp in 2014, and a hatred towards fx 5200's. I haven't yet watched the video, but I will in a bit, meanwhile I still got something to say. I had one of these suckers, one of my first hand me downs happened to be an hp workstation, (man the mobo on that thing was finicky, only liked certain settings) a 478 p4 at 2ghz, 512mb rdram and one of these firegl cards. I had to use the gf 4 mx440 in that pc, I remmember that card not running minecraft (which was my main game at the time), some opengl issue with the firegl drivers, yet it crushed anything else I had in 3dmark 2001se (that was my main benchmark at the time since my gpu's werent dx9, or powerful enough to run 3dmark03) was really sad having to put the best card on a shelf, I even tried modding radeon drivers to see the card as a radeon, still crashed on minecraft.
I think you will find this video interesting. I had similar issues with OpenGL. Please share your thoughts when you watched it, I'm kinda not done with this card, hope dies last :D
+PhilsComputerLab Great video as usual, I too have spent countless days trying to make that card run my games. At one point I remmember it ran the game, loaded a world, and after a few seconds of walking around the game just dissapeared in a "silent" crash. I don't remmember what I did to it tho. I might try to dig up my card and see if it's still alive and if I can do anything, but it might be a huge waste of time, setting up an agp system with the amount of room I got, is a pain. I'll look for the card and keep an eye on this comment section, if anyone has something that they think will work and you haven't tried it yet without success, then I might try it aswell. I kept thinking about a bios mod, but I don't have an agp system with integrated display out, or I might have a socket a mobo somewhere with a vga port, hmmm, I could try flashing the card if it still works, if I brick it then I could reflash the hp bios, but I don't have floppies, or optical drives, since cd's never worked for me I ditched optical altogether, and I'm too new in the game to have any floppies, so unless the flashing program can be booted off a usb stick, I'm out of luck. I first still need to figure out why my phone charges at 100ma instead of 2Amp (unlike my old phone) trying to charge from any standard usb source takes days, leaving me with only the "fast charger" that they gave me, and for the diy guy like me, being tied to a wall socket is not cool. So I gotta find time for that too. But I don't think we'll see a radeon guru give us a bios to try anytime soon sadly. If there is a way to turn this into a fully working 8500 I could try selling it, I still have the fx 5200 for agp mediocrity, and get something better for my struggling pcie system, as it is this card is collecting dust, but I highly doubt there are any old hardware guys around this area, not everyone has money for such a hobby, or money for hobbies in general here. Anyway, sorry for the long comment with little off topic parts, I always get carried away.
What if you flash an 8500 bios into the FireGL 8800? Maybe that does the trick to enable all the opengl features?
Hello Phil,
do you still have the ATI FireGL 8800? (2:20)
Mine is broken and I need a high resolution image from the back.
Greetings!
It's all on storage and I don't have access at the moment.
@@philscomputerlab Too bad. Thanks for the answer.
I'm tempted to get a FireGL like this, desolder the BIOS chip, flash it with an 8500 BIOS and check it out...
That would be awesome if you could figure it out!
Was checking out those babies, they are actually around 15€ a pop, but shipping to Portugal is 40€!!! That's a show stopper right there!!!
Yes postage can ruin a good deal. It's why I usually get 2 or 3 cards, it lowers the average price.
Ironic that it doesn't work well with OpenGL considering it's called the FireGL.
As you have more than one card, have you tried applying the Radeon 8500 firmware to one of them and seeing what happens?
So, the price on these cards in 2024 is $400 Canadian from China for the AGP version, or you can pay $1,000 for a brand new one in the box, and it is only a DirectX 8.1 video card, not even DirectX 9.0.
I got a old pentium 4 computer with 1 gig of ram what's a good cheap agp graphics for retro gaming with Windows 2000 and xp
Johns Memes nvidia 7600gt (got the 512 mb msi silent)
on the fireGL if i install the radeon drivers like you did i will have the same performace of the radeon?? the last instalation you did
Yes! Use the latest Catalyst for the 8500, manually install it on the FireGL and you get top notch D3D performance!
I have Radeon 9000 machine running, maybe it will help. Search for atioglxx.dll and atioglx1.dll files in system32 folder. These are opengl drivers. If there aren't any - unpack atioglx1.dl_ and atioglxx.dl_ from \Driver\2KXP_INF\B_32846\ with 7zip and copy DLLs to system32. If it doesn't help there are several registry keys mentioning these files.
Thanks will give it a go.
Those files are present in system32...
Try searching registry for "atiogl". I have 2 registry keys pointing at those files and one with ogl version. If no keys found - copy everything mentioning atiogl from a proper 8500 intallation. Can't find any info on the internet, hope it helps.
What about using the unofficial Omega Drivers?
I tried them, with those even D3D doesn't work. They work well with other Radeon cards though, like a 9700.
Phil did you ever find a solution to the OpenGL issue with the 8800?
No I didn't :( So I see this card as a DirectX only project!
PhilsComputerLab alright. I may take a swing at getting it working then since I have a couple of these cards. It seems a shame such a descent retro card is plagued with this issue...gotta be a low level way to make it work.
@@mesterak I've also got two of them, though I don't know if they're working. However, i'd be really interested if they could finally run OpenGL games properly, since I'd like to use them for my retro machine projects.
Christian Siegle thanks for replying. That’s enough motivation for me to dig into this and see what I can do.
@@mesterak Thanks buddy! Appreciate a lot! :)
Is the Quadro NVS line workstation or just work?
I have a fireGL card that kicks ass for an agp card but it has absolutely no OpenGL support. Kinda silly given its name
LOL I thought the same! Not much fire there if it can't run OpenGL games :D
The running joke back then for me was that It didn't have OpenGL because it would catch fire otherwise, hence FireGL.
But it is supported with the right drivers. They sort of copy the 8500 GL driver code and performance is near identical ofcourse.
Couldn't you just download a Radeon 8500 ROM and flash the FireGL to an 8500? Then OC the mem speed and such to match the FireGLs speed.
Try it! I've given up on this card LOL
im suprised that open gl did not work since it seems it uses same GPU (R200)... especialy in omega drivers which rocked at a time... maybe you can save me both vga bios and send it to me so i can try to substitute vendor id so it sees fire gl as standard 8500... i would also need ven id and prod id
The BIOS does contain the device ID, but it is also stored in an ASIC and that's where the driver looks. I've attempted flashing various 8500 BIOS onto the FireGL and it bricked the card. Of course I was able to recover using a PCI video card.
I am trying to edit the FireGL BIOS with RaBiT, it lets me change the device ID from 5148 to 514C. But 5148 is still stored in the ASIC of course.
PhilsComputerLab
Ofc that other bios will not work since other card uses different ram chip hence different timings... try dumping bios and open in rabit and see voltages and timing (look hard for cl latency) and then edit bios from 8500 input exact data and then try to flash... im talking from memory but i done similar thing way back when i replaced some failed vram from nonworking card with other vendor vram... gosh it was ages ago
there is also mod to flash 8500 to R9100... some say its better some says its not... it supposed to enable some feature TruForm
None of this solves the initial problem.
...ah ok then... if you want me take a look in bios send it to me so we can experiment
any link on what is ASIC? for real modding hex editing is must
if card is recognized as some other card then other driver could be used so i guess OpenGl should work then
edit:so card id is red trough chip itself... im not sure, i think vga bios determines that...
similar approach
www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/875-softmod-amd-6970m-firepro-m8900-update-6990m-works-too/
thank you for your content and what you do, its realy great, love your channel and i learned a lot :)
keep up the good work
sorry for bad english
Couple years ago I got a FireGL X1-128 for free, which is basically a Radeon 9700. Since I knew that the drivers for workstation GPUs are not best for gaming, what I did I just got a BIOS from an ATI 9700, edited it to match the FireGL clocks and flashed the card. No issues, worked perfectly, enjoyed it a lot :)
On a Radeon 9700 you could also move a resistor and it would turn into a FireGL. But nobody did the reverse, so there is no information. The BIOS trick doesn't work with the 8800 as the PCI device ID comes from another chip, not the BIOS. It's the same with the Quadro2 Pro for example. Windows will change the name, but the drivers, and options will not change.
I remember playing the very first Hitman game on a Fire GL X1 256P in Open GL, it blew me away the difference in graphics from when I first played the game on a PIII 450 with an ATi PCI card... Cant remember what the card was, maybe a Rage XL 8Mb but the difference I remember
old Radeons allowed for so many flashing options. I loved em :D
Did you by chance try the Omega drivers?
Yes no luck.
Dangit :/
I know it sucks, I did spend a ton of time trying to figure out OpenGL on these cards. A real shame, but for a pure DirectX card, these are great, and can be had for a good price.
Please get FX 5800 of 6600 GT and modded to 6800.. 6200 can too. sorry mi ingles is bad
how would it work with Windows 98? i would love 2 try it on Windows 98 if i had some
8500 seems to work in 98, but no drivers for the 8800.
Downvote. I wanted to see how the games actually play on it, not some graphs.
Why the other card has tv tuner ??
The same graphics chip was also available on graphic cards without TV-tuner but this particular card was from ATI's All-in-Wonder series that was famous for it's multimedia features.
Phil, I'm a little upset that you use Adblock :(. You should really look into uBlock Origin.
I have UA-cam red subscription and white-list sites that I frequently access.
Oh I'm not disappointed that you use an adblocker, I'm just disappointed that you don't use a good one haha, don't worry man. I do the same thing. ublock origin is just way better with system resources and offers better blocking, and most importantly, security
I see, thanks might check it out.
PhilsComputerLab While you're at it also check out disconnect ;)
Exactly! Though I do believe that Disconnect isn't up to scratch of late. I think the original dev sold it to a third party and its been doing some sketch stuff. The App for Android even got removed from the playstore so...
I seem to recall that the original Radeon had some good "paper features and specs" but there was an issue going on and then when the ATI Radeon 8500 released, the same thing was sort of going on and iirc it was drivers from ATI just not being there on the same level as Nvidia.
I recall that people had many issues every time ATI released a new driver for the ATI Radeon 8500 and behind the scenes ATI was supposedly working on the R250 but in the meantime they developed the R200W which was specifically used for the ATI Fire GL 8800 and guess what? SOMETHING ALSO happened to that card and it must have been related to drivers from ATI which in the workstation world, you can't play around... but at least LATER the drivers got better but there were issues getting them "from ATI"... I'll just say that... meanwhile iirc a friend had gotten the Nvidia Quadro (Nv20 based aka GeForce 3 GPU) and he could use EITHER the vanilla Nvidia peasant drivers or the WORKSTATION elite drivers...
What am I saying with this? well as far as PC gaming is concerned the ATI Fire GL 8800 drivers were not necessarily that good for Direct X games and OpenGL games because some feature was missing and it varies per game... make sure you use Republic Commando and other games... basically I feel that ATI did not try to fix the driver support issues with the R200 8500 and although the R200W was more stable, some features were not addressed so then the R300 happened and again iirc, it was like ATI forgot the R200 8500 existed and there was a feeling that their driver team needed to focus on the R300... also because that GPU was made by a different team, hype, lots of gamer hype, etc...
As far as professional apps the R200W performs well with later drivers that at first were not available on ATI's website...
Anyways I still believed the R200 had better paper specs than Nv20 and Nv25 but that's just blind fanboyism... Nvidia has issues with Nv30, sure and fixed them with Nv35 but Nv40 imo was a gold... G80 was like super duper gold, G92 was amazing platinum and G92b was super platinum but GT200 was not handled well... thanks to no challenge from ATI because GT200 was just diamond that could cut Crysis and Crysis Warhead into Very High and Enthusiast plus sliced and diced meal at highest resolution on a 4:3 CRT Trinitron workstation monitor
I actually did buy AMD graphics but they seem to suffer from the same issues as ATI with driver support.
Also imo the ATI Fire GL 8800 with the 128MB of ram it had, should have smoked all the GeForce 3Tis and the base GeForce 4Ti in theory but it comes down to driver support... I'm sure someone will get mad.
Great comment thank you 🙂
Fix your caps lock key
Isn't the Radeon 9200 the same as 8500?
Not at all!
You could just flash a radeon 8500 bios into it.
That would be too easy :) They put measures in place to make it harder.
But still it can be done, you just need to force the flashing utility to bypass the hwid check :) So you need seperate flashing tool like ATIFLASH and bios .rom file.. you can even modify the bios file to keep those 275/300 clocks instead of the 275/275 for the radeon 8500.
I know how to flash the card of course. The PCI device ID is read from a separate ASIC, so what's stored in the BIOS isn't relevant unfortunately.
Why are the caps marked ????
Good question, this is with most ATI cards from that era.
I thought running windows xp on an SSD would ruin the SSD?
Probably because back when people still ran windows xp ssd's where tiny. Operating systems that do a lot of writes eat trough small ssd's like candy.
But i ran it on a 128gb ssd for years without any issues though.
Over 100gb the ssd has the room to level the wear over the entire drive and it will last a lot longer.
Funnily enough I run the Radeon AiW 8500DV in a socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 system. Never had any of these issues. Maybe go try the driver built for the 8500dv. Worth a try anyway.
Of course, that's a Radeon not a FireGL.
Flash the non fire gl bios / firmware to the card and make it a regular 8500.
That doesn't work as the PCI ID is embedded in another chip.
You change edit the PCI ID in a BIOS editor ;)
That doesn't work, the PCI ID comes from another chip, not from the BIOS.
We were flashing non quattros to quattros and back in the day. Might be a geforce thing.
No it's the same for GeForce. All it does is change the name to Windows, but the drivers check the actual PCI Device ID, which doesn't change when flashing. It's stored in another chip.
zee*
It would be nice if graphics cards disappeared from the market and were integrated into the processor like the AMD A10-7800k (Kaveri) APU then there would be nothing for the Cryptocurrency miners except the NVidia graphics cards, maybe INTEL Corp should purchase NVidia Corp.
DAVID GREGORY KERR Probably not a chance. For one, gamers would have to upgrade the whole CPU (which can cost hundreds) instead of just the GPU. This might include changing the motherboard as well if the CPU socket was changed in the meantime.
Secondly, the graphics capabilities would be much less powerful, which gamers would not be happy about.
But really, for office or lightweight home stuff, integrated graphics are more than enough, including HD video playback and beyond.
DAVID GREGORY KERR Also, What do you have against crypto miners? If they pay for cards, manufacturers are happy. The latest stuff sure may be a bit more expensive, but it's probably cheaper for a patient gamer when they release all these used super-cards on eBay and flood the market, lowering used card prices in general (IDK if this is what actually happens, but it seems to me that it would, someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
Swift Fox I am running an AMD A10-7800 kaveri which is more that enough with 16GB of ram
DAVID GREGORY KERR I'm not fully up to scratch on current CPUs, but I'm pretty sure that the A10s are supposed to be higher-end, right? I'm not surprised it's enough actually - I was running on a laptop with integrated Intel HD4000 with an i5-3210(m?). It was plenty enough for almost anything, including most games. It did help that I was mainly playing 6-8 year old games as I liked those the most ;)
Although admittedly the newest games would probably struggle, and even the old 6-8 year old ones you wouldn't run on high or ultra-high settings. Everything else though, perfectly fine, and painless when it comes to drivers because the Intel open source ones are fairly high quality on Linux. Really, unless you are a gamer or need the power of a graphics card for some reason, there is no need to buy one as a casual home consumer.