ATI Technologies Radeon 9800 PRO MAC EDITION User Manual

RADEON™ 9800 PRO MAC
EDITION
User’s Guide

P/N: 137-40566-10

Copyright © 2003, ATI Technologies Inc. All rights reserved.

ATI and all ATI product and product feature names are trademarks and/or
registered trademarks of ATI Technologies Inc. All other company and/or
product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective
owners. Features, performance and specifications are subject to change without
notice. Product may not be exactly as shown in the diagrams.

Reproduction of this manual, or parts thereof, in any form, without the express
written permission of ATI Technologies Inc. is strictly prohibited.

Disclaimer

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this
document, ATI Technologies Inc. assumes no liability with
respect to the operation or use of ATI hardware, software or
other products and documentation described herein, for any act
or omission of ATI concerning such products or this
documentation, for any interruption of service, loss or
interruption of business, loss of anticipatory profits, or for
punitive, incidental or consequential damages in connection
with the furnishing, performance, or use of the ATI hardware,
software, or other products and documentation provided herein.

ATI Technologies Inc. reserves the right to make changes
without further notice to a product or system described herein to
improve reliability, function or design. With respect to ATI
products which this document relates, ATI disclaims all express
or implied warranties regarding such products, including but not
limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for
a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

i

Table of Contents

Disclaimer.............................................................................i

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

What You'll Need......................................................................................... 2

Related Documentation............................................................................... 3

Multimedia Features. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Viewing 3D Graphics................................................................................... 5

ATI Displays Control Panel........................................................................ 6

Using Mac2TV™ Video Out....................................................................... 8

Enabling Mac2TV...................................................................................... 10

Set Up Tab............................................................................................ 10

Optimizing Mac2TV.................................................................................. 11

Controls Tab ......................................................................................... 11

Ratio/Size Tab ...................................................................................... 12

ATI Displays Preferences.......................................................................... 14

ADVANCED DISPLAY OPTIONS......................................................... 15

VERSAVISION™ Tab ........................................................................ 15

Display Control Tab ............................................................................. 16

Advanced DFP Tab .............................................................................. 17

ATI HELP .................................................................................................. 18

Using DVD and QuickTime® Playback .................................................. 18

Using Digital Flat Panel (DVI) ................................................................. 19

Video Mode Table...................................................................................... 21

Supported Modes.................................................................................. 21

Digital Flat Panel ................................................................................. 22

Specifications.............................................................................................. 23

System Requirements ........................................................................... 23

Operating System ................................................................................. 23

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

ii

Introduction

The RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION represents the next
generation in 3D and video acceleration for your Power
Macintosh
for multiple combinations of CRT and Digital Flat Panel
monitors. Your new graphics accelerator provides:

• Flexible dual-display support enabling many combinations
utilizing VGA, and DVI connectors for analog and digital
displays.

®

computer. It includes flexible dual-display support

• OpenGL

®

accelerator providing superior 3D rendering
performance and advanced imaging and filtering
techniques.

• Industry leading DVD acceleration for High Bitrate, low
CPU usage playback, of the latest movies at any resolution.

•QuickTime

®

playback accelerator for full screen, full

motion, DVD quality video.

• TV-Out support via S-Video connector.

1

What You'll Need

The RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION runs with the
following minimum system requirements:

• Any Power Macintosh

®

computer with an AGP 4x/2x

expansion slot.

• Mac OS X version 10.2.5 or higher.

• VGA-style monitor (see note below)

panel, Apple

®

ADC style digital flat panel (using a third

party powered adapter) or Apple

, DVI style digital flat

®

multi-frequency

monitor.

•QuickTime

®

6 or higher.

• Minimum 128MB of system memory required for
Mac OS X version 10.x.

Connecting a second VGA monitor requires a DVI-to-VGA
adapter (included) to connect to the RADEON 9800 PRO MAC
EDITION graphics accelerator.

Future references to Mac OS X in this manual are intended to
be generic and inclusive of their respective versions of the
Macintosh

2

®

operating systems.

Related Documentation

The README file summarizes the latest product revisions.
Click the README icon on the installation disk to open this
file.

Help is available by clicking on the button in the ATI
Displays control panel or through the Apple
You can browse through the Help or search for a specific topic.

®

Help Center .

3

Multimedia Features

Your RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION turns your Mac
computer into a 3D and 2D graphics powerhouse. You can use
your new graphics accelerator card to:

• Enjoy true-color 32-bit 2D or 3D graphics up to 2048 x

1536.

• Watch full screen, full motion, DVD quality video using

the Apple
acceleration.

• Output your Mac’s display to digital flat panels and digital
projectors.

• Output your Mac’s display to a TV.

The following information describes these features in more
detail and suggests ways you can optimize your machine to get
the most out of your new card.

®

DVD Player or QuickTime® playback

4

Viewing 3D Graphics

RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION’s 3D Acceleration
features supports the following advanced 3D graphics
capabilities:

• 8 Pipeline architecture.

• 256 bit memory interface.

• 4 parallel vertex pipelines.

• 128 bit floating point shader pipelines.

• 350 million triangles per second transform rate.

• Single Pass multi-texturing for up to 16 textures.

• Full Scene Antialiasing (gamma corrected, up to 6x, Super­Sampling or Multi-Sampling).

• Bilinear, Trilinear, and 16x Anisotropic filtering.

• Shadow acceleration.

In addition, the RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION brings
new and exciting graphics technologies to the Macintosh
platform:

®

SMOOTHVISION

™

is an anti-aliasing solution that raises the

bar for image quality using programmable multi-sampling
methods to post-process graphics before they are displayed.

SMARTSHADER

™

is a new technology which revolutionizes

the graphics pipeline by making both the geometry processing
and pixel processing stages more programmable than ever
before. Developers can easily create amazing new graphics
effects while maintaining a high level of performance.

HYPER Z

™

makes Z-buffer bandwidth usage more efficient by

decreasing the amount of information sent to the frame buffer.

RADEON

9800 PRO MAC EDITION only displays 3D
graphics in thousands and millions of colors. When you set your
display to 256 colors, this will affect Finder, OpenGL, Quartz
Extreme, and QuickTime

®

acceleration.

5

ATI Displays Control Panel

The ATI Displays control panel provides access to the advanced
features that RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION has to offer.
To open the ATI Displays control panel using Mac OS X:

1 Open the Apple

®

System Preferences.

2Click

or

1 Click the Hard Disk icon.

2Click Applications folder.

3Click Utilities folder.

4Click ATI Utilities folder.

5 Double-click ATI Displays.

For detailed instructions on how to set up and use these features,
please refer to ATI Help, which can be accessed through the ATI
Displays control panel.

Display Info dialog shows the current display settings of the
specific monitor ATI Displays is running on.

Detect Displays button detects all connected displays. This
feature is useful when a second VGA monitor is connected to
your graphics adaptor. Detect Display removes the need to
restart your computer.

Note: Your display will momentarily go blank while the
displays are being detected.

6

The Profile dialog presents information on the specific
RADEON graphics card and video driver installed in your

computer. Even if the ATI Displays cannot identify your ATI
product it will still provide display configuration, driver version
and other related information. A warning dialog will display if
no ATI product is installed in your computer.

The Support dialog provides an internet link to specific ATI
Technologies’ web pages such as product information, warranty
registration, and FAQs.

Click Create Apple

®

System Profiler Report button to

generate a detailed report of the computer’s installed hardware
and software.

7