The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-01-08, 09:02:

Most prominent are: […]
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havli wrote on 2024-01-07, 10:28:

By the way - are there any 128MB R8500 (275 MHz, non-LE). I have never seen one, only 128MB LEs and R9100.

Most prominent are:

Hercules 3D Prophet 8500
Gigabyte MAYA AP128DG-H RADEON 8500 Deluxe - https://www.ixbt.com/video2/any-r200-5-p1.shtml
Gigabyte MAYA AP128DG-H3, which is RADEON 8500XT (300/600) variation of the card above.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-01-07, 13:42:

Im guessing the Opengl issue under XP is driver related.

To be fair, Radeon 8500/Fire GL 8800 are not really well-suited cards for XP era. There is a workaround which involves using Omega drivers. Or you can use two separate Windows XP installs to play Direct3D or OpenGL games.

Any particular version of the Omega drivers ?

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-01-08, 09:02:

Most prominent are: […]
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Most prominent are:

Hercules 3D Prophet 8500
Gigabyte MAYA AP128DG-H RADEON 8500 Deluxe - https://www.ixbt.com/video2/any-r200-5-p1.shtml
Gigabyte MAYA AP128DG-H3, which is RADEON 8500XT (300/600) variation of the card above.

Thanks, these are very nice cards. Must be very rare, I guess very few of them were sold back then.
Also I had no idea 8500 XT existed 😁

I've never seen a 8500XT, only heard of it back in the days. I had a 250/200 8500LE 128MB at the time. It did its job well, considering I had upgraded from a GF2 Ti.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-01-08, 10:16:

I've never seen a 8500XT, only heard of it back in the days. I had a 250/200 8500LE 128MB at the time. It did its job well, considering I had upgraded from a GF2 Ti.

Its one of the rarer versions of the 8500, IIRC not many were produced as you needed a high binned core to hit the clocks along with fast memory so it made the card expensive, I dont believe ATI ever released their own version of the card but was by AIBs willing to bin R200 cores and Vram to hit the 300/300 speed.

Im guessing that getting Vram to hit the required speed may have been the limiting issue at the time it was being released.

The FireGL 8800 though is essentially the ATI 8500 XT clocked at 300/290.

Any particular version of the Omega drivers ?

AFAIK any version based on Catalyst 6.x should do.

If the Wikipedia article and the TechPowerup page are correct, the 8500 XT never came to market because they focused on the development of the R300.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R200_series
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R200_series

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/no-radeon- … g-at-cebit.222/

Hoping wrote on 2024-01-09, 19:33:

If the Wikipedia article and the TechPowerup page are correct, the 8500 XT never came to market because they focused on the development of the R300.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R200_series
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R200_series

Yup, a few AIBs did make their own and the FireGl 8800 from ATI is as close as they got officially.

Yeah, I thought the general consensus at the time was that ATI looked into it, saw there wasn't enough headroom in design as it was and (wisely) decided to focus on getting R300 out the door instead of putting time and money into a respin. Sure, there were higher clocked R200 cards but we don't really know what ATI's goal was in terms of clocks for an official XT model. Considering how small the gains were at 300 MHz, one would have to believe they were shooting higher.

IIRC the real problem with R200 was always the memory bandwidth not being enough to push any kind of meaningful anti aliasing or higher resolutions.. I can't recall for sure but I'm not sure MSAA was even a thing at the time, I remember SSAA being the only option maybe?

SSAA it was, with many modes. As time went by shaders could shift the bottleneck.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-01-10, 13:43:

IIRC the real problem with R200 was always the memory bandwidth not being enough to push any kind of meaningful anti aliasing or higher resolutions.

And the drivers... as usual

R200 variants were also used a lot for cheap Radeon 9000,9100,9200,9250 with the misleading "9" to make them appear as DX9 compatible

I think only 9100. 92xx were RV250/RV280 based (Radeon 9000), so 4 TMUs instead of 8.
Most of those 9100s are missing DVI. Memory is usually 4ns. Some are even 64-bit, missing half of memory chips.
Some 8500LEs (PowerColor) came with 3.6ns Hynix and probably could be flashed to 8500 clocks (275/275).

FireGl 8800 is good with DX driver, but OpenGL is a no-go. There were modding scripts for R300 in RivaTuner (Radeon-> FireGL, FireGL -> Radeon) and they work up to and including Catalyst 4.12 for OpenGL component. Not sure if anything similar exists for R200 in FireGL form. (I haven't tested if same scripts work for FireGl 8800 , since I don't have one. They work for FireGLX Z1/X1/X2.)

stef80 wrote on 2024-01-10, 14:43:

I think only 9100. 92xx were RV250/RV280 based (Radeon 9000), so 4 TMUs instead of 8. Most of those 9100s are missing DVI. Memor […]
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I think only 9100. 92xx were RV250/RV280 based (Radeon 9000), so 4 TMUs instead of 8.
Most of those 9100s are missing DVI. Memory is usually 4ns. Some are even 64-bit, missing half of memory chips.
Some 8500LEs (PowerColor) came with 3.6ns Hynix and probably could be flashed to 8500 clocks (275/275).

FireGl 8800 is good with DX driver, but OpenGL is a no-go. There were modding scripts for R300 in RivaTuner (Radeon-> FireGL, FireGL -> Radeon) and they work up to and including Catalyst 4.12 for OpenGL component. Not sure if anything similar exists for R200 in FireGL form. (I haven't tested if same scripts work for FireGl 8800 , since I don't have one. They work for FireGLX Z1/X1/X2.)

It was mentioned here earlier that DX and OpenGL both work ok under 98 using the Radeon 8500 drivers with the FireGL 8800, I could never get OpenGL working with the 8500 driver in XP but D3D worked just fine. Serpent Rider mentioned that the Omega drivers should work for XP, so when I get the chance ill test that, but in any case 98 is a better fit for the 8800/8500.

Its weird because there isn't much difference between the 8500 and 8800 aside from the VBIOS and core/vram speeds .. makes me wonder what they changed in the bios that affects OpenGL.

I have a Crucial Radeon 9100 128Mb card which is a rebadged 8500/8500LE, it does have fast Vram on it so it can hit 8500 speeds ...I wonder if I can flash that card with the 8500 Vbios and turn it into a fully fledged 8500 instead of the anemic 9100.

ATi and AMD (after buyout) had nasty segmentation for Direct3D and OpenGL APIs. Desktop drivers practically had no SMP support for OpenGL.

I have fond memories of how my HD 6950 couldn't run Rage properly for about 3 months after release. AMD emergency dropped about 3 hotfixes to incrementally make it run right. You have to wonder what was going on internally at AMD to cause that to happen. And I had watched a pre-release interview with John Carmack in which he said id Software had been working with AMD to get everything up to speed.

Anyway, 8500 was a pretty neat chip. Lots of interesting features and new programmability. But it surely has hardware bugs which are the cause of the long term driver problems.

R200 (Radeon 8500) also had TRUFORM, a genuinely interesting piece of technology that never got widely adopted, or adopted at all..

Sure it did, you see it all the time in games, its tessellation.

Ironically, tessellation is used very sparingly even today.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-01-10, 19:54:

Ironically, tessellation is used very sparingly even today.

Not much need for it with Nanite and other tech that is superior and faster in many ways, Truform was great for its time and AMD hardware was damn amazing at it but just like Hair works its best left in the past.

It could even be said that Nanite is a full evolution of Tesselation, taking that tech to the next level and making it far more useful than Truform ever was.