OK to update to latest ATI Driver under BC?

[lavrishevo]

I have a pre SR MBP 2.16 with the ATI X1600 video card. There are new drivers just released for this card but I am a little worried about updating them. I did this a long while back running BC in Tiger and it screwed up everything. After installing the update I lost the use of my display totally. Think this is safe or has anyone else done this lately?

Daniel

 

[Neil321]

Anyone care to answer this,as id like to know this also

 

[Komiksulo]

I updated; had no problems. "Late 2006" MB Pro with Radeon X1600 video card. When running under Fusion in a VM, the driver complains that it can't find the video card (understandably).

 

[lavrishevo]

Well I took the chance and did it. Downloaded the new driver from Feb. 8th and they did work. On first reboot I had the screen go totally black and I had to power off manually and reboot do the good old F8 then select VGA mode and configure the display. Now it has been happy with every reboot so far. Might try overclocking a tad now to how she plays.

 

[Komiksulo]

There's a separate X1600 driver for XP under Boot Camp. It's listed on http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html apart from the Windows XP drivers. Look under "Apple Boot Camp", below "Mac OS X". Select Windows XP under "Apple Boot Camp", then select your type of Mac, then the revision.

Interestingly, there's no driver listed for OS X 10.5.

 

[Neil321]

There's a separate X1600 driver for XP under Boot Camp. It's listed on http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html apart from the Windows XP drivers. Look under "Apple Boot Camp", below "Mac OS X". Select Windows XP under "Apple Boot Camp", then select your type of Mac, then the revision.

Interestingly, there's no driver listed for OS X 10.5.

many thanks bit confusing that you download while in os x thats all,as id have thought you downloaded them while in xp and used the ones for xp and not the bootcamp ones

 

[killmoms]

many thanks bit confused as to what OS i need to download them to,with the bootcamp ones is this in OS X or while in XP or do i download the ones for XP while in XP

They're XP drivers, for XP. You download them in XP. Boot Camp is just a tool to non-destructively partition your drive and set the boot order so that the Windows installer CD/DVD will boot. That's all it does.

 

[Neil321]

They're XP drivers, for XP. You download them in XP. Boot Camp is just a tool to non-destructively partition your drive and set the boot order so that the Windows installer CD/DVD will boot. That's all it does.

Many thanks for your reply yes im fully aware of what bootcamp is and does
ive been using it long enough i was just alittle confused and had a blonde moment thanks anyway

It confused me why their are ones for bootcamp and ones for xp if your in xp why not just download
the ones for xp

 

[Eric Piercey]

The firmware in your graphic card is specifically written for Apple hardware. That's why you can't just slap any card you want into your Mac. The windows driver's for the non-Mac version of the cards are obviously written for those cards with non-apple firmware. The drivers you're using when booted on your windows partition are optimized for the Apple cards. Now, were you to go out and buy a non Apple card and slap it into your machine, it wouldn't work in OSX but you could boot into windows and DL drivers for it and they'd work. There have been several posts about doing this sort of thing. It's frankly a pain in the butt. If you want the ultimate gaming experience build or buy a PC you can optimize to your hearts content, otherwise I'd avoid trying to upgrade the software for your Apple-bios video card in windows.

 

[Mr. Zarniwoop]

The firmware in your graphic card is specifically written for Apple hardware. That's why you can't just slap any card you want into your Mac. The windows driver's for the non-Mac version of the cards are obviously written for those cards with non-apple firmware. The drivers you're using when booted on your windows partition are optimized for the Apple cards. Now, were you to go out and buy a non Apple card and slap it into your machine, it wouldn't work in OSX but you could boot into windows and DL drivers for it and they'd work. There have been several posts about doing this sort of thing. It's frankly a pain in the butt. If you want the ultimate gaming experience build or buy a PC you can optimize to your hearts content, otherwise I'd avoid trying to upgrade the software for your Apple-bios video card in windows.

My Mac Pro with ATI X1900 XT works better (i.e. higher frame rates, by just a little in some games, a bit more in others) in Windows XP under BootCamp with the regular Windows XP 32-bit ATI Catalyst drivers instead of the Boot Camp Windows XP ATI Catalyst drivers or the Leopard Boot Camp ATI drivers. I also sometimes got lockups with the Boot Camp drivers, but never the regular (non-Boot Camp) drivers.

Unless someone can provide a tangible benefit to either the Boot Camp drivers on the Leopard DVD or ATI web site, I'll stick with the regular ATI Catalyst drivers.

 

[killmoms]

The firmware in your graphic card is specifically written for Apple hardware. That's why you can't just slap any card you want into your Mac. The windows driver's for the non-Mac version of the cards are obviously written for those cards with non-apple firmware. The drivers you're using when booted on your windows partition are optimized for the Apple cards.

The first part of this is true. However, the card's firmware has very little to do with its drivers in Windows, it merely provides the code necessary to speak to the system firmware at a low level. That's why you can install ATI's Catalyst drivers for "Mac-specific" cards and they work perfectly well—the drivers don't talk to the card's firmware, they talk to the GPU. Yes, layman's explanation.

 

[Mr. Zarniwoop]

The firmware in your graphic card is specifically written for Apple hardware.

While this is very true, that the cards have specific EFI32 (or in the case of the NVIDIA 8800 GT, EFI64) firmware for a Mac Pro. But, the ATI X1900 XT BIOS firmware embedded in the 2006/2007 Mac Pros used in Boot Camp is a standard ATI X1900 XT BIOS. Nothing fancy about it.

So once you're up and running and beyond the EFI POST, and the firmware gets switched to the ATI X1900 XT BIOS embedded in the 2006/2007 Mac Pro's firmware, there's nothing specifically written for Apple hardware there.

This is precisely why the "early 2008" Mac Pros can't use an ATI X1900 XT in Boot Camp, their firmware doesn't have an ATI X1900 XT BIOS embedded in it. But, since the card's firmware is EFI32, it works fine in OS X on "early 2008" Mac Pros.

 

[Eric Piercey]

Good info to know, thanks for correcting me.

 

[lavrishevo]

Anyone using the ATI tool to overclock a little. I know on my older Radeon X1600 Apple underclocked the card a good deal for heat / battery life I assume. I overclocked from Core 418 to 435 and Memory from 450 to 475. She seems happy so far. I tried 475/475 but she was not happy at all, crashed immediately. Even 450/475 was not good. 435/475 seems to be running fine.

Also starting in OS X and ramping up the fans to base of about 3000 rpm's and rebooting into BC helps a lot to keep her a lot cooler then not doing this. I think this is an important factor when overclocking the ATI as well.

Not having any problems running The Orange Box, HL 1, HL 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. Solder of Fortune 3 seems to me to be a little intensive for my system. Don't know why when SOF 1 & SOF 2 plays like a dream.

Again this is on MBP 17" 2.16 non SR, 2 gb ram, 200 gb 7200 Hitachi, ATI Radeon X1600 256, XP Pro.

 

[Neil321]

Many thanks for clearing things up,to be honest im now wondering if its worth the agg. I have both dreamweaver & flash on my xp partition so id be worried it could screw those up.Maybe i'll try uninstalling then try,if things did go screwy would just deleting & a re-install of windows be good to go

 

[Mr. Zarniwoop]

Anyone using the ATI tool to overclock a little.

You can't overclock an ATI X1900 XT on-the-fly in OS X with any tools I've seen so far. However...

Using Graphiccelerator you can change the GPU clock and memory clock of a firmware dump of the ATI X1900 XT EFI firmware, rev 140. The OS X ATI X1900 XT firmware has one fixed set of clock rates regardless if you're in 2D or 3D applications, they're coded right into the firmware. You then reflash the card with the edited dump to overclock.

None of this works with the rev 202 firmware from October 2007, as that's compressed and Graphiccelerator doesn't handle compressed firmware. I have no issues with the old rev 140 firmware personally, but "early 2008" Mac Pros won't boot with rev 140 and require rev 202. My 2007/2007 Mac Pro is happy running a flashed Sapphire ATI X1900 XTX at full XTX speeds... which is 8% faster GPU and 19% faster memory than the Apple-sold ATI X1900 XT, and that's just running the card at the speed it was designed to be run at by editing the EFI firmware to use XTX clock rates. From that standpoint, I'm not overclocking it.

Note that overclocking the EFI32 firmware don't matter under Boot Camp, as instead 2006/2007 Mac Pros have an ATI X1900 XT BIOS embedded that gets loaded. (Again, this is why this card currently can't be used in Boot Camp with an "early 2008" Mac Pro... Apple removed the ATI X1900 XT BIOS that was embedded in the 2006/2007 Mac Pro firmware.) But, under Boot Camp, using on-the-fly Windows-based tools work fine, including just loading the normal ATI Catalyst Overdrive utility.