[X24] Mobility Radeon performance tips

[maytagman]

Well of late I have been attempting to upgrade the drivers (circa 2003) of my lovely, venerable, beautiful X24. Much to my chagrin, IBM has not made an official release since the current 2003 drivers installed. The purpose of this endeavor is to attempt to maximize performance when chugging through Eve-Online (3dish MMORPG). Now, I know the X24 is capable of running it, as I was able to run it under the IBM driver, albeit at poor speed and resolution. I successfully installed the Omega driver for the radeon series, but the game now panics and dumps out returning an 'out of video memory' message in the debug log.

My questions are as follows, concise as possible.

1) I know the chipset has 8mb of memory to play with. Once this 8mb is expended, does the video commandeer some system RAM? Or does it simply run out of memory and seize up?

2) If so, does the IBM driver provide some special provision for it to borrow the system memory? Or should it work even with my generic-ish Omega driver? As I said, Eve booted fine with the IBM driver...

3) Does anyone have any familiarity with getting some performance out of this video subsystem?

The x24 is a great machine, and I know a 1.13ghz proc, 640mb of RAM, and my jerry-rigged 7200RPM drive provide more than ample performance for Eve and other mild games, IF the memory crisis can be solved. Certainly the radeon mobility (from what I read, based on the 7000 core) has great potential for some occasional low-res gaming on long flights. I've worked with the integrated 7000 series and gotten some really solid performance out of it.

Please share your wisdom and experience!

[maytagman]

Thinking about it again, since the VRAM and main RAM run at different clock speeds and are on different busses, I can't imagine them working in concert on the same set of textures... Still, it seems sort of stupid for them to integrate a 3d accellerator with 8mb of texture memory. That's like... late 80s technology at work there...

Am I just missing something?

In this case it seems like eve is going through all 8mb and then panicing. Maybe theres a way to have it do direct-to-ram?

[ragefury32]

Thinking about it again, since the VRAM and main RAM run at different clock speeds and are on different busses, I can't imagine them working in concert on the same set of textures... Still, it seems sort of stupid for them to integrate a 3d accellerator with 8mb of texture memory. That's like... late 80s technology at work there...

Am I just missing something?

In this case it seems like eve is going through all 8mb and then panicing. Maybe theres a way to have it do direct-to-ram?

What are you missing here? Let's see.

a) Here's the minimum requirements
OS: Windows® System 2000 SP2 /XP
CPU: Intel Pentium® III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon 800 MHz
RAM: 512 MB or more
HD space: 6.0 GB
Network: 56k modem or better Internet connection
Video: 32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting such as NVIDIA® GeForce 2 class card or above
Drivers: DirectX® 9.0c (included) and latest video drivers

Let's see.
The Processor is already a problem, as the X24 is at 1.13Ghz max, and you can't upgrade it.
The System memory is also a problem, since the X24 max out at 640MByte of memory.
The Video card is by far the biggest problem...
It cannot do hardware transform and lighting - period.

b) The Video memory does not guarantee speed. It's not like the more you have, the more game you are able to play. If Direct3D is bombing with "unable to allocate video memory" errors, then run the game at a lower resolution and turn off most if not all of the eye candy. Some games do want to clamp down a massive chunk of VRAM for texture caching - if they can't get it they'll usually bomb the game instead of dealing with the AGP port. Omega would not help in this situation at all - in fact, Omega drivers dropped support for the old-school Radeons awhile ago.

c) IBM was not "stupid" in bundling a 3D accelerator with 8Mbytes of RAM - it was forced to migrate to the Radeon M6s after the original Rage Mobility Ms used in the X20/21s were taken out of production - considering that the M6 is 4 to 6x the speed of the Mobility in 2D work, can support double the external screen resolution in Windows (important for business types doing powerpoint presentations), it's pin compatible, and the power consumption did not go up too much. The X22/3/4 series of machines were never sold with the premise of killer 3D - it just so happened that the Radeon M6 is not a bad 3D part for its day in addition to being a very good 2D part.

If you think having 8MByte of dedicated video memory is "Late-80s technology", well...let me surprise you - the latest Thinkpad X40/60 series machine have NO dedicated video memory whatsoever - everything is borrowed by system memory. Furthermore, if you are in the late-80s, your macdaddy multimedia machine, the Amigas and the Apple Macintosh IIs only have 1MByte of memory. IN TOTAL.

e) If you think the M6 is bad struggling with its own video memory? Google up something called the IGP320/340 from ATi. Basically these are designs that has a Radeon M6 with NO dedicated video memory. Those machines were nobody's favorites.

[maytagman]

I was not trying to incite an argument or show of force. You obviously have a grasp of the concepts at hand here, but rather than try and answer a simple question about memory spanning... Well I don't even know what this is supposed to be, besides a limp-wristed attempt to make me look like an idiot for even trying to hack my way around a problem.

In my defense I'm going to annotate your comments, not because I want to argue with you about anything, but because I want people to know I'm not a mongoloid, and perhaps even ellicit a constructive response.

What are you missing here? Let's see.

a) Here's the minimum requirements
OS: Windows® System 2000 SP2 /XP
CPU: Intel Pentium® III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon 800 MHz
RAM: 512 MB or more
HD space: 6.0 GB
Network: 56k modem or better Internet connection
Video: 32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting such as NVIDIA® GeForce 2 class card or above
Drivers: DirectX® 9.0c (included) and latest video drivers

>>>Thanks, it's clear I was unaware of the system requirements for my own game.

Let's see.
The Processor is already a problem, as the X24 is at 1.13Ghz max, and you can't upgrade it.
The System memory is also a problem, since the X24 max out at 640MByte of memory.
The Video card is by far the biggest problem...
It cannot do hardware transform and lighting - period.

>>>The game runs, right now, using d3d, using hardware. I am fully aware there is no hardware TnL. I am also quite aware of the specs of my own machine. As I mentioned, the game runs, hardware, on the stock IBM driver. This was a question of how vmem is manipulated, not about what is inside my laptop. It CAN run, this is just about making it run a little nicer, as there were many revisions between the 2003 driver release and the latest drivers from ati.

b) The Video memory does not guarantee speed. It's not like the more you have, the more game you are able to play. If Direct3D is bombing with "unable to allocate video memory" errors, then run the game at a lower resolution and turn off most if not all of the eye candy. Some games do want to clamp down a massive chunk of VRAM for texture caching - if they can't get it they'll usually bomb the game instead of dealing with the AGP port. Omega would not help in this situation at all - in fact, Omega drivers dropped support for the old-school Radeons awhile ago.

>>>Again. It is having no problem allocating memory, the problem is, it is reporting 'out of memory' when I know for a fact it is not, which, again, points to a driver issue. I am attempting to figure out how the IBM driver allocates the amount of memory needed from the system ram, if it does that at all. Obviously there is some voodoo at work if it is not allocating system memory, as theres no explanation why it would only use 8mb of vram with the ibm driver, but need more with the ati/omega one.

c) IBM was not "stupid" in bundling a 3D accelerator with 8Mbytes of RAM - it was forced to migrate to the Radeon M6s after the original Rage Mobility Ms used in the X20/21s were taken out of production - considering that the M6 is 4 to 6x the speed of the Mobility in 2D work, can support double the external screen resolution in Windows (important for business types doing powerpoint presentations), it's pin compatible, and the power consumption did not go up too much. The X22/3/4 series of machines were never sold with the premise of killer 3D - it just so happened that the Radeon M6 is not a bad 3D part for its day in addition to being a very good 2D part.

>>>I am blissfully ignorant to IBM's corporate strategy or the parts acquisition process during the time of this laptop's production. I don't care in the least why, or how this occurred. It is plainly obvious its not meant to be a 3d killer, but the core is there, and all that is preventing passible 3d performance for my cause is memory.

If you think having 8MByte of dedicated video memory is "Late-80s technology", well...let me surprise you - the latest Thinkpad X40/60 series machine have NO dedicated video memory whatsoever - everything is borrowed by system memory. Furthermore, if you are in the late-80s, your macdaddy multimedia machine, the Amigas and the Apple Macintosh IIs only have 1MByte of memory. IN TOTAL.

>>>Again, I don't feel there's any need to talk to me like I'm a child. I just asked a rather simple question... It's no 'surprise' to me about shared system memory. Obviously I understand the concept as that was the basis of my original question. If you want a history lesson I'll be more than happy to show you the SGI and VAX workstations I developed for 12 years ago and their associated render hardware from that time period. But who needs dedicated render farms when I can just run the studio off the Mac-Daddy amiga! You see telling me that 8mb is a required minimum pairing for the controller, or that the controller is not capable of jiving with allocated system memory without a proprietary routine that is present in IBM's driver only would have been a helpful response.

e) If you think the M6 is bad struggling with its own video memory? Google up something called the IGP320/340 from ATi. Basically these are designs that has a Radeon M6 with NO dedicated video memory. Those machines were nobody's favorites.

>>>It's not bad, it's not a gaming rig, but it's not bad. And that's all I asked for. Thanks for the welcome to thinkpads.com forum. It's nice to know that after years of developing the backend applications that allow you to have weather forecasts, international automated air travel, reliable guided cruise missiles, and satellites you can pilot with an Atari controller instead of 20,000 lines of code, I still have to get picked apart on an internet forum because I didn't cite the vast and colorful history of IBM's hardware roadmap.

I'm in Baghdad, right now, and I happen to have the same x24 that has flown with me to these crap destinations for 4 years. I don't exactly have a reliable way to get a new laptop of my liking, nor would I rely on anything besides my thinkpad. Here, we work with what we have, and what I happen to have is an x24. When I'm home, maybe I'll look into a new X, but for now, all I am looking for is an answer to my original question, I think that's fair... I'm just trying to write a decent driver here...


Oh, and you forgot d)
:3

[mazzinia]

Since indeed the radeon 7000 (and so the M6) is no more supported from the Ati Catalyst 6.6 , you should try using a version older than those.

Omega Drivers v3.8.252 or older should work in your case.
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=File ... dwn_id=295