ATI Radeon performance comparisons across different OS kexts?

[B S Magnet]

I’ve found the Tip:- ATI Rage 128 in Leopard thread to be one of the more invaluable finds when optimizing the very best from older PPC equipment bundled with that video card. It’s why I have, for instance, the Jaguar kexts active for the ATI Rage 128 card in my iBook G3 466 running Tiger.

This has me pondering whether subsequent ATI cards, such as the several used in Macs from the Radeon series, have specific kext groups bundled with a specific OS X versions which have been shown to out-perform, say, the kexts bundled with the OS on which a particular system may be running.

The machines I have presently which could benefit from a custom optimization, of bringing kexts over from, say, a build of Tiger or maybe even Panther, are an iBook G4 12" with a Radeon 9200 card running Leopard and a DLSD 17" PowerBook with the Radeon 9700 card, also running Leopard. Even if performance improvements from another or earlier kext/OS group are demonstrably mild, it’d nevertheless be the kind of thing worth adding to a list of PPC performance enhancements we know of.

I did some searching through the MR archives but found no kext analogues, vis–à-vis the ATI Rage 128 kext group, being tried with any of the Radeon-series cards.

Has anyone here looked into this, perhaps out of idle curiosity, and found the differences to be either negligible or simply incompatible?

 

[B S Magnet]

Update:

So I went ahead and tried a similar methodology used for the ATI Rage 128 thread linked to in the previous post.

What I did was source the final (10.4.11) Tiger kexts associated with the Radeon 9700, the card installed with the PowerBook G4 DLSD, and as root, moved those six files into place, in lieu of the Leopard kexts. These six kext filenames were:

• ATIRadeon.kext
• ATIRadeon9700.kext
• ATIRadeon9700DVDDriverBundle.bundle
• ATIRadeon9700GA.plugin
• ATIRadeon9700GLDriver.bundle
• ATIRadeon9700VADriver.bundle

With Xbench, the breakdowns were as follows:

LEOPARD KEXTS
Quartz Graphics Test: 77.89

Line: 62.56 [4.15 Klines/sec] (50% alpha)
Rectangle: 79.31 [23.68 Krects/sec] (50% alpha)
Circle: 71.79 [5.85 Kcircles/sec] (50% alpha)
Bezier: 82.92 [2.09 Kbeziers/sec] (50% alpha)
Text: 104.07 [6.51 Kchars/sec]​

OpenGL Graphics Test: 73.25

Spinning Squares: 73.25 [92.92 frames/sec]​

User Interface Test: 27.67

Elements: 27.67 [126.98 refresh/sec]​

TIGER KEXTS
Quartz Graphics Test: 70.62

Line: 51.89 [3.45 Klines/sec] (50% alpha)
Rectangle: 71.44 [21.33 Krects/sec] (50% alpha)
Circle: 64.70 [5.27 Kcircles/sec] (50% alpha)
Bezier: 80.90 [2.04 Kbeziers/sec] (50% alpha)
Text: 102.90 [6.44 Kchars/sec]​

OpenGL Graphics Test: 38.54

Spinning Squares: 38.54 [48.89 frames/sec]​

User Interface Test: 25.87

Elements: 25.87 [118.71 refresh/sec]​

While the other figures are only marginally lower, it appears the OpenGL Graphics Test is where the greater performance reduction for the Tiger kexts occurs — something on the order of nearly 50 per cent slower.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t dig out the Panther kexts for the ATIRadeon9700 series, it’s because a) I lack a Panther 10.3.9 build at the ready, b) this PowerBook G4 was never bundled with anything lower than, I think, 10.4.3 (or maybe 10.4.2); and c) I honestly didn’t investigate whether there are ATIRadeon9700 kexts for Panther (though, given the Power Mac G5 being configurable to run several different ATI Radeon kexts, it’s possible there is a Panther group).

* * *

(For fun, and not entirely related to the above test, I re-ran the ATI Radeon 9700 Leopard kexts after installing a new SSD to supersede the OEM 7200rpm 100GB HDD, and the outcome for the same graphics-related tests, were mostly the same, though marginally quicker.)

LEOPARD KEXTS (after new SSD installed)
Quartz Graphics Test: 79.18

Line: 61.94 [4.12 Klines/sec] (50% alpha)
Rectangle: 83.58 [24.95 Krects/sec] (50% alpha)
Circle: 75.98 [6.19 Kcircles/sec] (50% alpha)
Bezier: 81.27 [2.05 Kbeziers/sec] (50% alpha)
Text: 104.53 [6.54 Kchars/sec]​

OpenGL Graphics Test: 73.79

Spinning Squares: 73.79 [93.61 frames/sec]​

User Interface Test: 26.18

Elements: 26.18 [120.15 refresh/sec]​

The total difference in performance was slightly faster, but well within margins of variance given that this was on a separate day, as opposed to being promptly after testing the original Leopard kexts test above. I didn’t repeat the same with Tiger kexts, because I don’t expect much of an improvement in areas like OpenGL.

If you're curious, the total Xbench score for the Leopard kexts with the OEM HDD (last day) was 48.21; the same, except with an SSD (today), was 56.00. The read/write performance boost is significant. See the thumbnails below, since I’m genuinely too lazy to manually transcribe the disk test results.

HDD:

SSD:

 

[Amethyst1]

First of all, thanks for taking the time to look into this

If you’re wondering why I didn’t dig out the Panther kexts for the ATIRadeon9700 series, it’s because a) I lack a Panther 10.3.9 build at the ready, b) this PowerBook G4 was never bundled with anything lower than, I think, 10.4.3 (or maybe 10.4.2); and c) I honestly didn’t investigate whether there are ATIRadeon9700 kexts for Panther (though, given the Power Mac G5 being configurable to run several different ATI Radeon kexts, it’s possible there is a Panther group).

The "early 2005" 15/17in PowerBooks have a 9700 and shipped with Panther; the 10.3.9 combo updater has the necessary kexts as I had no problem booting Panther on my 15in after applying it to a 10.3.3 installation.

EDIT: From the 10.3.9 combo:

 

[LightBulbFun]

not too surprised at the results

because the tiger acceleration kexts are incompatible with Leopards OpenGL framework etc, so you lose all graphics acceleration which defeats the purpose

 

[B S Magnet]

not too surprised at the results

because the tiger acceleration kexts are incompatible with Leopards OpenGL framework etc, so you lose all graphics acceleration which defeats the purpose

I did not know this, so I’ve learnt a lot of useful things from the exercise. Thank you.