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Ati Radeon 9800 Pro Driver For Mac: Where to Find and What to Know



The Radeon 9800 Pro is an AGP 8x card compatible with AGP 2x and 4xslots. It was a build-to-order for the 2003Power Mac G5, 2004 Power Mac G5, and2005 Power Mac G5. Apple's version of thecard included 256 MB of RAM.


ATI uses Samsung DDR memory chips on the 9800 Pro, and unlike the 9700, the 9800 card uses a four-pin Molex-type connector for auxiliary power. These connectors are more abundant in most systems than the smaller floppy-drive power connector on the 9700 cards, so the change is welcome.




Ati Radeon 9800 Pro Driver For Mac




Overall, the fill rate increase (and corresponding memory bandwidth increase) from the 9700 Pro to the 9800 Pro is fairly modest. However, since the 9800 Pro supplants the 9700 Pro at the same price point, the gains are quite welcome.


The 9800 Pro nicely distances itself from its older sibling, and it absolutely crushes the previous-gen NVIDIA card in single-textured fill rate. With multitexturing, the 9800 Pro is still quite potent.


The 9800 Pro barely pulls ahead of the 9700 Pro here, but both Radeons deliver Serious Sam at extremely high-quality graphics settings at over 60 fps at 12801024—an impressive accomplishment.


  • Price and performance details for the RADEON 9800 PRO can be found below.This is made using thousands of PerformanceTestbenchmark results and is updated daily.The first graph shows the relative performance of the videocard compared to the 10other common videocards in terms of PassMark G3D Mark.

  • The 2nd graph shows the value for money, in terms of the G3DMark per dollar.



IntroductionI am testing an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB AGP video card. Its part number is PN 109-A07500-00. It seems to have heatsinks on nearly every chip! I'm testing it on a KT133A based mobo with 256MB of RAM, and a mobile barton 2000+ rated CPU.


1) Link to this card's BIOS.2) Link to the ATI video card flash utility, FlashRom version 2.4.3) Links to the ATI Catalyst driver version 3.7. See note 3 below.4) Link to the ATI Catalyst driver version 6.2.


Notes1) The webpage for the BIOS says that the same BIOS can be found in the Crucial 9800 Pro, GeCube 9800 Pro, and Powercolor 9800 Pro cards. I assume this is the latest BIOS.2) This utility works in DOS. BTW, I found out all of the card's relevant BIOS info by running Everest Ultimate.3) Please google for this file. It's called wme-catalyst-7-93-030812a1-010735c-efg.exe. I tested some of these old ATI drivers, and information about these tests can be found below. I found that version 3.7 was the fastest.4) This is the latest and final driver which works on W98. It was written with ME in mind, and is based on the WDM (windows driver model). It seems to be the slowest driver to use, when I tested it with Windows 98.


Benchmark infoI decided to test some of the old ATI Catalyst drivers. I wanted to see if they made the card run any faster or slower. I began with version 3.1, and ended with version 6.2. Uninstalling one version then installing another version was problematic. In the end, I got this technique working OK. What you need to do is this:


1) Uninstall the ATI Catalyst software found inside the Windows 98 Control Panel "add/remove" software area. If it's listed as one item such as "ATI Driver", then you just need to uninstall that, but if it's listed as a "cluster" of 3 apps, with one of them being called "uninstaller", then double-click on that one in order to uninstall all 3 of these apps. Then reboot.2) Delete the "error / yellow exclamation mark!" VGA driver found inside the W98 control panel System / Display area. Then reboot.3) When the desktop reappears, W98 will reinstall the VGA driver. Rebooting is not necessary at this point.4) Run Driver Cleaner version 2.7. Select to clean out the "ATI" driver. Then reboot, although this may not be necessary.5) Install the next ATI Catalyst driver for testing...


3.1 = I could not get this to install. I don't think this version covers the Radeon 9800 Pro card. I think the Pro card was released after version 3.1 was released.3.2 = I could not get this to install. The installation routine reported "infsetup errors". I expect this version does not cover the Pro card.3.3 = I decided not to look for this version on the net.3.4 = 115023.5 = 115063.6 = 115343.7 = 11663 (Fastest)3.8 = 115543.9 = 114543.10 = 115283.? = I'm not sure if there are any more 3.x drivers, after version 3.10. I've seen 3.11 mentioned, but when I downloaded it, it was version 4.14.1 = 114894.2 = 114514.3 = 11297 4.4 = I don't think there's a driver for W98 from this version onwards. Apart from one more they did, which is version 6.26.2 = 10187 (Slowest)


It was a lot of "fun" trying to track down all of these old ATI w98 driver versions. If you want to do the same, here is a good tip. You'll find the Windows 2000/XP versions much easier to find. For example, just take a look on the oldapps.com website. Once you find them, notice that each download package has a text file in them with the large driver name. Copy this in to your clipboard, and paste it in to google, and then rename it to wme-xxxx, where xxxx is the large driver version number. (You want to remove the wxp-w2k letters.)


Then google for this search string. You'll then find the wme (windows me) driver versions fairly easily. Another tip is - change the first group of letters from wme-xxxx to control-panel-xxxx, if you find that the downloaded wme driver package has been "cut down" to just include the driver itself, and it does not contain the ATI control panel app. You can then track down the correct version number for the ATI control panel.


I had a 9800pro a long time ago and there was an option on the control panel to switch openGL into ASCI(or was it ANSI?). Quake 3 looked amazing but it was a little hard to aim. Such a cool feature though!


These cards were awesome when they were first released in the form of the 9500/9700. I still have a 9500 here that was unlockable to a full 9700, the only difference being they put slower memory chips on the 9500 so you'll never get full 9700 speeds on those but you can come pretty close with the core. You have to steer clear of the 9500 Pro cards, though. They are the ones that have the memory chips arranged in a straight line across the top instead of in an L configuration like on the 9700. They used a core that is closer to the 9600 and has no unlockable pipes. The 9600 was an odd card in itself. It was actually slower in most cases than the 9500 it replaced. They were going for power efficiency and passive cooling with the 9600. I guess they figured putting a fan on was too big an expense for their entry level card so they knocked down the clocks to keep the chips from heating up too much. The 9800 was still outstanding even against the FX5800 from nVidia. It wouldn't be until the GF 6800 was released that nVidia would have a serious challenger for ATi to compete against. A 9700/9800 is probably the best card you could buy for games of that time frame. These cards are also the last ones that you can get that have an official Win 98 driver. NVidia hung on a bit longer with Win 98 so if you need the absolute fastest card for Win 98, then the GF 6x00 cards are what you want but the Radeons still aren't bad.


Actually the 9500 (non-Pro) was the one that was missing half the rendering pipes (disabled by default). Whether you could unlock the disabled ones or not was all a matter of chance. The Pro still retained the 8 full pipes that the 9700/9800 has.


I think the plain 9700 was one of the more exciting options. They would often overclock right past the stock 9700 Pro. I had one that went from 275 to 360 MHz or something which put it in the realm of the 9800 Pro. That was a gigantic improvement over my previous Radeon 8500.


Originally the 9500 non-Pro was created so ATi could make use of their binned 9700 chips with defective pipes. When demand exceeded the supply of binned chips, they started using fully functional 9700 cores with 4 cores locked, so some do unlock and some artifact to varying degrees when you try to unlock them depending on how badly damaged the core is. I do not think this was ever the case with the Pro version of the card as they were never unlockable but they used a crippled memory controller to keep it from competing too directly with the 9700. ATi went through the same thing with the 9800 SE being unlockable to a full 9800 and the X800GTO2 being unlockable to a X850 XT. I think they started laser cutting their cores after that.


256MB. This is how much memory many laptops come with today. This is 128 times more memory than I had in my first PC, a 466SX from IBM. This also is 128 times more memory than my first 3D card had (the Rendition V1000). Finally, this is the amount of memory that ATIs flagship, the Radeon 9800 256MB Pro, has.


The 256MB version uses DDR-II memory clocked at 10 MHz higher than the 128MB 9800 Pros DDR-I memory. However, according to some comments on the Web, the latency of the DDR-II memory is slightly higher which could negate the extra 10 MHz advantage.


Installing the 256MB 9800 Pro was painless. While the card is a bit longer than a normal 128MB 9800 Pro, it still isnt long enough to have trouble fitting into the case. Compared to a FX 5900 Ultra, the card even could be called short. Power is provided with a normal 4-pin Molex connector instead of the floppy-connector that the 9700 Pro uses. 2ff7e9595c


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