If you configure your Linux before experimentation to connect via ssh you can use another computer to ssh into a terminal when the graphics fail and use that to check /var/log to see if the error is actually critical or possibly just a configuration issue
Nvidia cards in linux on the G5 almost always boot to black screens. You could have done extra setup over ssh after the machine booted for the AMD cards once the machine was up though.
sometimes depends on the bios setting but I don't imagine there would have been many back then. Some graphics cards start in UEFI as opposed to legacy and wont display until operating system . Makes it very hard to change the bios settings with the cards in .
@@tobiwonkanogy2975 no BIOS, no UEFI, this is a Mac, the video card does not get intialised by the system at all if it's not native to it. There's a FreeVGA system which can initialise the cards by extracting the BIOS Option ROM from the card and running it in an x86 emulator to bring up the card. I don't know how ATI driver does it, whether it has a similar mechanism or just enough inherent knowledge of the chips to bring them up.
@@SianaGearz I sincerely had no idea that mac did not use the same BIOS (start up function with gui) as pc . i was under the impression that mac was just an operating system . Now that i think a bit harder, if you want to use the os on non native hardware you need to emulate a mac.
One thing to remember is that you shouldn't remove the fan behind the DVD, is for cooling the northbridge chip (and you should mod to add a laptop fan for better results) it's one of the many reasons these die an early death
and the board can handle a 6 pin to 8 pin my 6870 only has an 8 pin and ive running a 6 to 8 and its fine 2d aceleration is meh but 3d is fine doom 3 at 90 plus fps lol
While the g5 does have a 6-pin power for graphics, I would rather use an external PSU to avoid wearing out the G5 PSU, as they are very expensive to replace.
I think the G5s Mini PCIe Power only supports 75 Watts if I'm not mistaken. So 75 Watts from the slot and another 75 from the logic board connector. It's not enough for some cards.
This Powermac G5 has onboard 6pin socket for dedicated graphics card. You'll need special cable for that. Quadro fx graphics card needs additional power lines. Still might be not enough power for what you want to use in this computer.
Polaris and newer cards will never work because amdgpu doesn't work on big endian. Same goes for any nvidia card, nouveau also requires little endian CPU. Any card supported by radeon kernel module will work, so the fastest GPU you can use is R9 series, R9 280, R9 285, R9 290 (don't go for R9 290, most of them are faulty). If you want to get headless console for debugging, plug USB-TTL adapter into a USB port and append console=ttyUSB0 to kernel parameters. Then on another machine plug USB-TTL adapter, connect GND to GND and cross TX - RX, RX - TX. (Or use ssh, but if boot process will hang you won't be able to figure out why.) FT232-based adapters are the only ones that work on macOS without any hassle (even on M1 on Monterey).
If he wanted, he could also check power consumption and, if below 150W, could use the internal mini-6-pin available for PCIe. And that's interesting and useful information! It cuts out a few GPUs I had my eyes on. I think the 7850 would be a decent choice, especially as it'd be a bit cheaper but still RadeonSI compatible :)
@@archlinuxrussian By specification, PCI-E port itself can deliver 70W, 6pin connector can deliver 75W and 8pin connector can deliver 150W. That's by spec though, people often go waaaaay beyond that. Considering that he's got 1500W absolute unit of a PSU, he should splice 12V wires and make connectors for permanent setup :D
It's really too bad that he can't use the AMDGPU driver as that could enable him to use RADV. Would it even be possible to re-work AMDGPU to support big endian?
@@gnarlin4964 from what I've seen, there has been *some* push for it, but basically there isn't the real demand for it to justify spending hours on it.
For what it's worth, there is a mini 6 pin connector. It's really hidden and hard to get at, but it is there and it does work. I have my Quadro plugged into it.
I've been waiting months for these shenanigans!!! As I mentioned months ago, PPC Linux has tempted me to buy newer AGP cards for my MDD - but, considering their general rarity, I've been dragging my feet. I'm very excited to see if you can iron out the kinks - maybe put the power to use in some emulation software... Thanks Sean!
Those familiar with Linux would know nVidia drivers aren’t “baked in” and require compiled kernel mods, so, of course, Radeon GPUs are going to work better. nVidia cards (2000-series +) may work better in the near future, though.
Yepp, amdgpu (GCN, RX550) won't work because G5 is big endian. Nvidia cards will never work, even on nouveau because it also requires little endian CPU. Fastest GPU that can be used in G5 with big endian is R9 285/R9 290, because those are last GPUs supported by radeon kernel module.
@@tweakz_tech It will, because it uses radeon kernel module by default. It's possible to switch to amdgpu on those cards, but by default radeon gets loaded and should work without any problems. In theory, R9 390 should also work. Polaris or anything newer is no-go though.
nvidia cards 2000+ wont work either. nvidia has no plans to mainline that driver, and the kernel developers don't want it anyway since 1) all the actually-needed stuff is now a giant userspace blob 2) it doesn't use mesa, the linux kernel's built-in implementations of OpenGL, OpenCL, and vulkan. don't believe linux youtuber hype, nvidia didn't actually open source anything.
Outstanding! I have two G5’s dual processors waiting for some love. I need to put them together with two Polaroid film scanners. That’s the goal! The Polaroid scanners require SCSI interface. Can you please recommend a SCSI/PCI card for these computers? Thanks for shedding light on this G5’s revival!
I've been able to find everything BUT the dual and quad core G5s locally, but these videos you've been doing about them have helped me get pretty close to completely scratching that itch!
While I'm not 100% sure with the nvidia cards, I do wonder if the reason the AMD cards past the HD6000 series are not displaying anything is down to an issue I encountered in the radeon driver years ago (and still have today)! If you're able to ssh in, or even pre-configure GRUB before replacing the GPU, you could try passing the "radeon.dpm=0" boot flag in GRUB to disable the dynamic power management for the card in the radeon driver. I STILL need to do this on modern kernels for my R9 390 with the radeon driver in order to get video, and given the RX560 and other Polaris era GPUs aren't too distantly related to 390, I wouldn't be surprised if this issue still persists with more modern cards. For the nvidia cards, I do wonder if it's even just a simple case of still requiring the old "nomodeset" boot flag in GRUB in order to get video, as with any halfway modern nvidia cards I've dealt with in Linux recently, I've still found all these years later that that flag is still required when using the nouveau driver 🤔
Hey, just to clarify, my g5 quad does have a mini 6 pin pcie connector on the pcie express area, just as the Mac Pro 5.1. I actually use this connector to power my Quadro FX 4500 that I flashed for the G5. I don’t remember another connector, but there is at least one. The Mac Pro 5.1 has 2 of these. Adapters are really cheap on Amazon.
I think the reason why the 2070 did not boot is because of the pcie class just being 1.0. I also highly doubt that the g5s have support for uefi. I believe it might work with a Kepler gpu.
It's probably endianness. 400 series and newer only has nouveau support on ppc64le, and even then most people I know who have Blackbirds or Talos IIs use Radeons because GeForces aren't supported particularly well even in little endian.
The older PCI-E standards provide very little power, and the amount was raised on later specs. Your newer cards that don't have power adapters may have been trying to draw more power than your Mac supplied over PCI-E. You can get adapters that allow you to add power to the slot.
As I was watching this morning my friend sent me a link to a G5 w/ a 20 in cinema display and a bunch of software for only $50! Had him pick it up for me while I'm stuck at work. Looks like I'll have a G5 of my own to play with tonight.
15:19 I have those same exact Logitech speakers sitting on my desk right now haha. Also, the most likely reason the GPUs are performing poorly is that the PCIe slot is PCIe 1.0, which is extremely slow and bottlenecking the cards. Since the original card was designed to run at that speed, it has no issues. The newer ones, although backward compatible with 1.0, are designed to run at faster speed, and have trouble running slower.
@@ActionRetro My Powermac G5 DC 2Ghz runs a reflashed x1950xt that needs one and I remember having a hard time locating the plug on the motherboard. I used a "Mini 6 Pin male to 8(6+2) Pin male PCI Express Video Card Power Adapter Cable" off of Amazon. it is located just to the left of that pcie card -tail thing holder's top post.
I used to run an external psu for my 7800gs in my g4 tower, and my dual 7448 accelerator card. Its easy to turn it on, just paperclip two pins. Eventually the internal power supply died and the external atx became the main via a quick piggyback adapter to convert the power lines to the g4 layout
I am not a Mac kind of guy (my first computer was a classic mac when ppl had P3 lol but I loved it) but I really love your channel dude ! Surprised to see these we're more customable than I thought !
so it looks like the older radeon driver works but the newer amdgpu and nouveau drivers do not, i'd want to see dmesg and the kernel log which could both be checked via connecting over SSH
r7 250 is the newest radeon that almost worked i would try to debug this one but you can always put in 2 graphic cards and try to soft switch in the linux after system boots on the first low power gpu
"...and if you enjoy eeking tiny gains out of ancient machines with absolutely no regard to performance per watt..." Yep! That's me. Still waiting for you to investigate air cooling options for this beast as I've one myself that has overheating issues with the water cooling system.
Just wanted to say, thanks for inspiring my interest in MacOS. I was given a late 06 Polycarbonate iMac that I just tore down and SSD swapped and installed Snow Leopard on.
i have been working to fix the endianness issues in Mesa for Radeon, but it's a mess. every time i squash one bug, it uncovers about 4 more, and it very quickly exploded into a massive number of changes, which made things less usable even though it's closer to being correct
I had a G5 with a flashed GeForce 6800 Ultra as a daily driver back in 2011, when my Core Duo Mac Mini died and I had to save up for a MacBook Pro. The Ultra required extra power as well, in the form of two Molex connectors. I passed down the optical drive's power connector through a hole behind the HDD cooling fan, and installed a Molex splitter to power the card. It worked fine. Since there are Molex to 6-pin adapters available as well, you could do the same to run the HD6870. This is the cheaper solution. The more expensive (and more Apple-like) one is to track down one of those mini 6 pin to regular 6 pin cables used in the Mac Pro 1,1-5,1 machines, the Late 2005 G5 should have support for those as well.
@@methanoid I just looked it up, I paid 15 euros for two cables including shipping in December of 2018. For some reason I thought I paid way more for it :)
The Apple DVI display doesn't have a scaler and thus the video cards that didn't work might just not be lighting up due to that limitation (eg: video initializes at say 1024x768, display won't scale it, thus no video even though "all is good") so I'd recommend trying either VGA or a DVI display that has a scaler (that Spectre one might). But yeah, ideally ssh into the system when it's in the black screen state and poke around to see what's up as it should be fairly obvious.
Ah, I see comments have already alerted you to the PCIe power connection on the motherboard... I've been trying to do this for years at this stage and have full acceleration working in Gnome/Wayland on a 5450 and was considering experimenting with something a little newer/more powerful. My G5 Quad won't boot without detecting a display connected to a card with functioning open firmware support so I have to leave the original 6600 in addition to whatever AMD card I add, though. Did you install some kind of OFW hack to make it boot without or perhaps yours has a different firmware version to mine?! Incidentally, Nvidia cards are gonna be a dead end unless you go something pre-500 series which has proper clocking support in Nouveau because you can't use the binary drivers on a PPC. Note that your game was using softpipe rendering according to the teminal output, I suspect you have some kind of issue with the build of Mesa included with Void. I run Gentoo on mine and the acceleration works fine.
Nouveau drivers for Big Endian PPC are the most unstable junk I have ever seen. On my 2005 PowerBook 12 inch, I can’t play videos with VLC properly (severe graphical bugs). On ATI GPUs, I can. The OpenBSD/pre-2012 Linux driver “nv” is probably more stable, but it won’t work on modern Linux distros (making the first generation iMac G4s unable to run modern graphical Linux, since nouveau is broken on these). Of course, Nvidia never made drivers for PowerPC CPU, so you can’t use those.
Softpipe is the slow software OpenGL driver in Mesa. You'll want to see radeonsi as the driver. You should check to see what glxinfo says from the command line. It's also possible that distro didn't install the radeonsi driver.
The thing I forgot to mention when I was typing on my phone lol... you can see what drivers its trying to load of you do "LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo > /dev/null".
Seems like there is some sort of hardware incompatibility that happens between the 6000 series Radeon Card and the 200 series (probably between 6000 and 7000 since most of the 200 series except for the highest end ones, are just rebadged 7000 series GPUs.) There as an architecture change between the 6K and the 7K cards. A die shrink too. The 6000 series were the last of the Terascale architecture and the 7000 are the 1st GCN architecture. (except for 7400 and lower which were still Terascale 7500 and up were GCN)
Yeah, having OpenGL is not an indication that what you're doing is GPU accelerated. As you saw, it's using the MESA rendering engine -- that's a CPU based rendering engine.
"This old Mac" is giving me "This old house" vibes--an old tv show (that's apparently still going) about home remodelling. Maybe "This old Mac" would be a good title for a video series :)
This issue of black screen is a issue of the GPU firmware not being compatible with Open Firmware and on Intel Macs the GPU Firmware mostly not being EFI GOP Conform
How do you bounce for 20:33 ? lol Great video and the energy is like a crackhead on crystal drinking Monster energy drinks with a coffee IV going. Thanks for the time it takes to create, edit and UL this content bro!
I know this video is old and someone probably already said this in the comments but when it comes to Linux it will require the firmware to some devices such as video cards. Some cards can cope without the firmware files but end up with odd colors or lack of 3D acceleration and some cards won't work at all until the kernel detects the firmware. For a example in Debian/Ubuntu a lot of AMD cards require the "firmware-amd-graphics" package. On my PC I forgot all about the firmware and only got a black screen. Had to SSH in and install the firmware then rebooted and finally got video. Never used VOID Linux since I don't like runit as the init system but it wouldn't surprise me it would be the same thing needing drivers/firmware.
Put the cables through the PCIE top bracket hole. You left it open already! Also given the older radeon gpus work I assume a newer driver would be the solution to get the newer radeons working to some extent. There may also be some random other issue for most of the newer cards used (all of them may require newer features like resizeable BAR and such like Jeff Geerling ran into with his raspberry pi gpu shenanigans.) I agree with comments about ssh troubleshooting and adding nouveau to retry some of these. May also help on performance and firefox accel support.
I'd never heard of separate GPU power supplies, BUT when that was made I'm sure there were a lot of cases where folks had perfectly good power supplies that were bought previously to their current (then-new) PCIe motherboards. I currently have a 1200watt power supply, currently powering my 2019 X399 build that I bought subsequent to that and if it isn't showing any obvious signs of error, I'm sure I'll use it for whatever I replace my X399 board with in a couple of years 🤷 (having said that and now thinking about my setup, I may very well replace it with a completely modular PSU, that was the only mistake I made...I mistook "partially modular" for 100% module :/ )
Is that apple monitor an analog DVI? Modern graphics cards no longer support analog video out, and I noticed all the more recent cards were the ones that didn't work with it. Try the modern monitor with the cards that didn't work. The 2070 could just be because it's too recent and the firmware isn't there. I don't know how to go about installing firmware on void. You could also try installing the proprietary Nvidia driver ahead of time with a different card
I do hope you don't intend to keep that water cooling solution in there. Even if its more reliable then the early ones, it's still a ticking time bomb especially 20 years later.
Mesa doesnt compile anything other than softpipe/llvmpipe for PPC64 by default, you have to compile Mesa yourself with radeonsi/nouveau/iris and ANV/NVK/RADV for it to do hw acceleration
I'm thinking there's just a configuration issue with those gpus that ain't working, I've had that black screen issue when moving from a 970 to a 3060, maybe you should do a follow up booting from an usb or something like that
Do you have a way to watt reader to measure the power usage of the PMG5 and the GPU? If so, and you have enough headroom, you could just use molex (or SATA power) to PCIe power cables. I've run computers that way before, and they were fine (though, they didn't haver dual G5s lol).
Do you know whats really mind blowing? As Linux 5.15 supports AMD Radeon RX 5000 or even 6000 series directly in kernel as, these are open source, these could work out of the box .... so you could try a RX5700XT, 6700XT or even 6900XT if you can get hold on one. The additinal power supply delivers 450Watts? Should be plenty for any of these cards ... and remember the normal Power supply of the MAC delivers 75Watts via PCIe slot so even a 400 Watts Graphics card could be fine.
The Black screen from the other cards might be a resolution issue with the monitor. I'd try a 8GB RX580, I think you'd actually have a reasonably performant machine.
I messed around with putting a Radeon HD with 2 dual-link DVI ports that was reprogrammed with Barco firmware into a G4 Quicksilver running Leopard (with modifications). It worked, which is about as much excitement as I got out of it. The performance was terrible beyond the second monitor. I’m sure it was driver related but I didn’t know enough at the time to dig in further. I worked in healthcare IT and we had just piles of cool expensive hardware to play with in our downtime. I mostly found amusement in plugging random stuff into other random stuff to see what would happen 😂
Great video :) Wish I had that many spare cards my GPU has started to fail on me and I've been off work sick for 7 weeks so no hope of being able to afford a replacement
I haven’t messed with the pre intel Mac towers at all, but even on the intel Mac Pros 1,1-3,1 they won’t support beyond the HD series from ATI or nvidia past the 600 series. Unless you modify the system in a couple ways due to lacking instructions sets on the CPUs. My 3,1 from 2008 I have modified to run Mojave and use a Vega card with it. Using Nvidia cards on Mac post to their dispute all those years ago is just a bad time.
Hardware acceleration in the browser is a mess on Linux. You actually have to manually turn it on in Firefox and can require separate builds for chromium based browsers. Nvidia seems to be a particular mess. Also, nouveau doesn't ship firmware for Nvidia cards so you might have to put in some work to get things like video acceleration working on older devices. The Nvidia cards in particular require a lot more tweaking, especially on Mac devices.
the problem is with those that have pci-x slots cannot use pcie cards as i tried …pci cards doesnt work in those slot except last slot which is a pci type …so agp is the only way
Mine has a Quadro in it, an RX4500 Quadro to be exact and all I needed was to plug it into another pc that had dedicated graphics and flash it to work with the mac OSX, then plug it into the Quad G5. Only paid 27 bucka on ebay for the quadro as well.
If you want hardware accelerated Firefox on Linux you really want to be using the latest versions since a *lot* of work has gone into making it fully functional and reliable it over the past few years (mostly as a side effect of the WebRender project).
I've been looking for a modern-ish (GCN) AMD gpu for my G5. I mostly settled on a 7850 as it's old enough to be cheaper while also being RadeonSI-supported. That, or something like the R7/R9 270. The G5 can go up to 150W with the mini-6pin to 6pin cable for power, but I'd rather not run right up against that limitation D:
@@virtualtools_3021 but there's still the Radeon kernel driver, no? I recall that, when amdgpu was first launched, GCN 1 cards, specifically Southern Islands cards, could enable amdgpu support and blacklist radeon...could one not do the same but in reverse?
That GPU power supply was nicer than I expected. Although part of me wonders if the GPU power cables are starting to get sticky from age. The plastic over them doesn't looks like the kind that stands up to the test of time.
It's just soft PVC, it'll last for 20 years with little degradation and instead of becoming sticky, it first starts to become more stiff and less bendy and eventually affter maybe 40+ years becomes brittle. It can also melt other plastics it gets in touch with if left unventilated.
Mi Mac torre G5, me enciende la torre, la pantalla no, da negro total, tampoco enciende el teclado para poder configurarlo, da 2 colores rojos adentro cuando se enciende, me equivoqué en colocar un código para quitar contraseña al dar en enter con esa equivocacion que no me di cuenta, se quedó así como lo estoy escribiendo, estaba funcionando y todo bien, pero le quería quitar la contraseña y me sucedió lo que escribo, el como hacer para que el teclado me funcione y entrar a sus datos.
Would it be possible to modify / reconfigure the VBIOS of any *semi-modern* graphics card such as my 980 ti to work with open firmware natively? Or have a modified version of open firmware to support more graphics cards?
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 the bios they are flashing are x86+ so idk if someone can rewrite an entire vbios for open fiormware . now what one can do is flash open bios on these a user named the kitchen sink did that but some moderator closed the forum she was hosting
@@amdintelxsniperx yeah, I will say that there are ways to figure out the differences between Mac and PC versions of GPU firmware, comparing the hex code between them It's how Mac flashing started, I can see people figuring it out for PowerMacs and patching PC VBIOSes to work with older PPC
If you configure your Linux before experimentation to connect via ssh you can use another computer to ssh into a terminal when the graphics fail and use that to check /var/log to see if the error is actually critical or possibly just a configuration issue
Would be funny if all you have to do is xbps-install linux-firmware.
Alternatively have the original card in beside the new one and check the output of dmesg / log
My "new" card failed to load because of missing firmware, I am attempting to bake it into the kernel right now
Nvidia cards in linux on the G5 almost always boot to black screens. You could have done extra setup over ssh after the machine booted for the AMD cards once the machine was up though.
sometimes depends on the bios setting but I don't imagine there would have been many back then. Some graphics cards start in UEFI as opposed to legacy and wont display until operating system . Makes it very hard to change the bios settings with the cards in .
sometimes i just wait 5 mins and then input my login slowly , press enter and then screen initializes
Not just on the G5. Nvidia Linux drivers are trash.
@@tobiwonkanogy2975 no BIOS, no UEFI, this is a Mac, the video card does not get intialised by the system at all if it's not native to it. There's a FreeVGA system which can initialise the cards by extracting the BIOS Option ROM from the card and running it in an x86 emulator to bring up the card. I don't know how ATI driver does it, whether it has a similar mechanism or just enough inherent knowledge of the chips to bring them up.
@@SianaGearz I sincerely had no idea that mac did not use the same BIOS (start up function with gui) as pc . i was under the impression that mac was just an operating system . Now that i think a bit harder, if you want to use the os on non native hardware you need to emulate a mac.
One thing to remember is that you shouldn't remove the fan behind the DVD, is for cooling the northbridge chip (and you should mod to add a laptop fan for better results) it's one of the many reasons these die an early death
Ah thanks!
@@ActionRetro the northbridge (in fact uses HyperTransport) is on the back of that big ass mobo, that's why most people forget about it...
The Late 2005 does have a PCIe power cable though. There is a miniPCIe 6 pin socket hidden on the board, you could just use that
and the board can handle a 6 pin to 8 pin my 6870 only has an 8 pin and ive running a 6 to 8 and its fine 2d aceleration is meh but 3d is fine doom 3 at 90 plus fps lol
While the g5 does have a 6-pin power for graphics, I would rather use an external PSU to avoid wearing out the G5 PSU, as they are very expensive to replace.
Yes G5s have a mini 6-pin and gives you a 6-pin connection similar to the Mac Pros. It was still cool to see the external solution though.
@@der0keks Expensive? I bought mine for $47 on eBay in 2021
I think the G5s Mini PCIe Power only supports 75 Watts if I'm not mistaken. So 75 Watts from the slot and another 75 from the logic board connector. It's not enough for some cards.
This Powermac G5 has onboard 6pin socket for dedicated graphics card. You'll need special cable for that. Quadro fx graphics card needs additional power lines. Still might be not enough power for what you want to use in this computer.
Yes G5s have a mini 6-pin and gives you a 6-pin connection similar to the Mac Pros. It was still cool to see the external solution though.
Polaris and newer cards will never work because amdgpu doesn't work on big endian.
Same goes for any nvidia card, nouveau also requires little endian CPU.
Any card supported by radeon kernel module will work, so the fastest GPU you can use is R9 series, R9 280, R9 285, R9 290 (don't go for R9 290, most of them are faulty).
If you want to get headless console for debugging, plug USB-TTL adapter into a USB port and append console=ttyUSB0 to kernel parameters. Then on another machine plug USB-TTL adapter, connect GND to GND and cross TX - RX, RX - TX.
(Or use ssh, but if boot process will hang you won't be able to figure out why.)
FT232-based adapters are the only ones that work on macOS without any hassle (even on M1 on Monterey).
If he wanted, he could also check power consumption and, if below 150W, could use the internal mini-6-pin available for PCIe.
And that's interesting and useful information! It cuts out a few GPUs I had my eyes on. I think the 7850 would be a decent choice, especially as it'd be a bit cheaper but still RadeonSI compatible :)
@@archlinuxrussian By specification, PCI-E port itself can deliver 70W, 6pin connector can deliver 75W and 8pin connector can deliver 150W.
That's by spec though, people often go waaaaay beyond that. Considering that he's got 1500W absolute unit of a PSU, he should splice 12V wires and make connectors for permanent setup :D
It's really too bad that he can't use the AMDGPU driver as that could enable him to use RADV. Would it even be possible to re-work AMDGPU to support big endian?
@@gnarlin4964 from what I've seen, there has been *some* push for it, but basically there isn't the real demand for it to justify spending hours on it.
That Godsmack joke was legitimately funny and perfectly delivered. Did not know that this was possible on TechTube
For what it's worth, there is a mini 6 pin connector. It's really hidden and hard to get at, but it is there and it does work. I have my Quadro plugged into it.
I've been waiting months for these shenanigans!!! As I mentioned months ago, PPC Linux has tempted me to buy newer AGP cards for my MDD - but, considering their general rarity, I've been dragging my feet. I'm very excited to see if you can iron out the kinks - maybe put the power to use in some emulation software...
Thanks Sean!
Those familiar with Linux would know nVidia drivers aren’t “baked in” and require compiled kernel mods, so, of course, Radeon GPUs are going to work better. nVidia cards (2000-series +) may work better in the near future, though.
I certainly hope they work better with the new drivers, the blob driver has all sorts of issues with the 30 series, and nouveau barely works at all.
Yepp, amdgpu (GCN, RX550) won't work because G5 is big endian.
Nvidia cards will never work, even on nouveau because it also requires little endian CPU.
Fastest GPU that can be used in G5 with big endian is R9 285/R9 290, because those are last GPUs supported by radeon kernel module.
@@elly3713 Every R9 GPU is GCN based, so not working in G5.
@@tweakz_tech It will, because it uses radeon kernel module by default. It's possible to switch to amdgpu on those cards, but by default radeon gets loaded and should work without any problems.
In theory, R9 390 should also work. Polaris or anything newer is no-go though.
nvidia cards 2000+ wont work either. nvidia has no plans to mainline that driver, and the kernel developers don't want it anyway since 1) all the actually-needed stuff is now a giant userspace blob 2) it doesn't use mesa, the linux kernel's built-in implementations of OpenGL, OpenCL, and vulkan. don't believe linux youtuber hype, nvidia didn't actually open source anything.
Outstanding! I have two G5’s dual processors waiting for some love.
I need to put them together with two Polaroid film scanners. That’s the goal! The Polaroid scanners require SCSI interface.
Can you please recommend a SCSI/PCI card for these computers?
Thanks for shedding light on this G5’s revival!
I've been able to find everything BUT the dual and quad core G5s locally, but these videos you've been doing about them have helped me get pretty close to completely scratching that itch!
While I'm not 100% sure with the nvidia cards, I do wonder if the reason the AMD cards past the HD6000 series are not displaying anything is down to an issue I encountered in the radeon driver years ago (and still have today)!
If you're able to ssh in, or even pre-configure GRUB before replacing the GPU, you could try passing the "radeon.dpm=0" boot flag in GRUB to disable the dynamic power management for the card in the radeon driver. I STILL need to do this on modern kernels for my R9 390 with the radeon driver in order to get video, and given the RX560 and other Polaris era GPUs aren't too distantly related to 390, I wouldn't be surprised if this issue still persists with more modern cards.
For the nvidia cards, I do wonder if it's even just a simple case of still requiring the old "nomodeset" boot flag in GRUB in order to get video, as with any halfway modern nvidia cards I've dealt with in Linux recently, I've still found all these years later that that flag is still required when using the nouveau driver 🤔
I haven't seen anybody talk about Sauerbraten in so long. Loved that game back in the day
Action Retro is my adult Saturday morning cartoons.
Couldn't have said it better myself. :)
Hey, just to clarify, my g5 quad does have a mini 6 pin pcie connector on the pcie express area, just as the Mac Pro 5.1. I actually use this connector to power my Quadro FX 4500 that I flashed for the G5.
I don’t remember another connector, but there is at least one. The Mac Pro 5.1 has 2 of these. Adapters are really cheap on Amazon.
The G5 have two connectors too.
I think the reason why the 2070 did not boot is because of the pcie class just being 1.0. I also highly doubt that the g5s have support for uefi. I believe it might work with a Kepler gpu.
I got a RTX 3090 to work with a Pentium D and PCIe 1.0
I coul watch 8k videos on it but i have never seen a worse bottleneck.
It's probably endianness. 400 series and newer only has nouveau support on ppc64le, and even then most people I know who have Blackbirds or Talos IIs use Radeons because GeForces aren't supported particularly well even in little endian.
@@kjjustinXD show us video of benchmarks
The older PCI-E standards provide very little power, and the amount was raised on later specs. Your newer cards that don't have power adapters may have been trying to draw more power than your Mac supplied over PCI-E.
You can get adapters that allow you to add power to the slot.
As I was watching this morning my friend sent me a link to a G5 w/ a 20 in cinema display and a bunch of software for only $50! Had him pick it up for me while I'm stuck at work. Looks like I'll have a G5 of my own to play with tonight.
15:19 I have those same exact Logitech speakers sitting on my desk right now haha. Also, the most likely reason the GPUs are performing poorly is that the PCIe slot is PCIe 1.0, which is extremely slow and bottlenecking the cards. Since the original card was designed to run at that speed, it has no issues. The newer ones, although backward compatible with 1.0, are designed to run at faster speed, and have trouble running slower.
Optical drives are great, I will probably keep my desktop with one stocked for years to come.
I have a LiteOn Bluray burner in my Quad G5, with a SATA-to-IDE bridge on its back! ;-) Works just fine with Toast!
there is a pcie power hookup on the motherboard. just one though. you just need a mini pcie to pcie cable and the ability to find it.
Oh woah, I had no idea!
Yeah, it's used for the more high-power GPU options, namely the Geforce 7800GT
@@ActionRetro My Powermac G5 DC 2Ghz runs a reflashed x1950xt that needs one and I remember having a hard time locating the plug on the motherboard.
I used a "Mini 6 Pin male to 8(6+2) Pin male PCI Express Video Card Power Adapter Cable" off of Amazon.
it is located just to the left of that pcie card -tail thing holder's top post.
@@Miasmark Thank you!!
I used to run an external psu for my 7800gs in my g4 tower, and my dual 7448 accelerator card. Its easy to turn it on, just paperclip two pins.
Eventually the internal power supply died and the external atx became the main via a quick piggyback adapter to convert the power lines to the g4 layout
I am not a Mac kind of guy (my first computer was a classic mac when ppl had P3 lol but I loved it) but I really love your channel dude ! Surprised to see these we're more customable than I thought !
so it looks like the older radeon driver works but the newer amdgpu and nouveau drivers do not, i'd want to see dmesg and the kernel log which could both be checked via connecting over SSH
I wonder if the first card wasn’t “good enough”, given it has the same memory and maybe could have been tweaked to be accelerated?
r7 250 is the newest radeon that almost worked i would try to debug this one but you can always put in 2 graphic cards and try to soft switch in the linux after system boots on the first low power gpu
Oh neat idea thanks!
"...and if you enjoy eeking tiny gains out of ancient machines with absolutely no regard to performance per watt..." Yep! That's me. Still waiting for you to investigate air cooling options for this beast as I've one myself that has overheating issues with the water cooling system.
This resonated with me, also, and it makes me want to rebuild a Vaxstation II GPX.
Need more g5 content! Love it and keeps me interested in my own machine
Just wanted to say, thanks for inspiring my interest in MacOS. I was given a late 06 Polycarbonate iMac that I just tore down and SSD swapped and installed Snow Leopard on.
i have been working to fix the endianness issues in Mesa for Radeon, but it's a mess. every time i squash one bug, it uncovers about 4 more, and it very quickly exploded into a massive number of changes, which made things less usable even though it's closer to being correct
the nouveau driver has too many endian problems in the kernel driver to even boot, and i haven't bothered trying to untangle it at all :\
Oh wow! Thank you for your efforts!
Quality content at its finest!
It may just not like PCIe 3.0 (or later) cards. The cards that worked were 2.0
This dude is a madman.
I had a G5 with a flashed GeForce 6800 Ultra as a daily driver back in 2011, when my Core Duo Mac Mini died and I had to save up for a MacBook Pro. The Ultra required extra power as well, in the form of two Molex connectors. I passed down the optical drive's power connector through a hole behind the HDD cooling fan, and installed a Molex splitter to power the card. It worked fine. Since there are Molex to 6-pin adapters available as well, you could do the same to run the HD6870. This is the cheaper solution. The more expensive (and more Apple-like) one is to track down one of those mini 6 pin to regular 6 pin cables used in the Mac Pro 1,1-5,1 machines, the Late 2005 G5 should have support for those as well.
It does have support for the mini 6-pin, it was used for G5s that came with a Geforce 7800GT, for example.
Cable is cheap
@@methanoid I just looked it up, I paid 15 euros for two cables including shipping in December of 2018. For some reason I thought I paid way more for it :)
The Apple DVI display doesn't have a scaler and thus the video cards that didn't work might just not be lighting up due to that limitation (eg: video initializes at say 1024x768, display won't scale it, thus no video even though "all is good") so I'd recommend trying either VGA or a DVI display that has a scaler (that Spectre one might).
But yeah, ideally ssh into the system when it's in the black screen state and poke around to see what's up as it should be fairly obvious.
I have the dual 2.3 which I believe is the fastest G5 without water cooling but I specifically bought it to use MorphOS
Ah, I see comments have already alerted you to the PCIe power connection on the motherboard... I've been trying to do this for years at this stage and have full acceleration working in Gnome/Wayland on a 5450 and was considering experimenting with something a little newer/more powerful. My G5 Quad won't boot without detecting a display connected to a card with functioning open firmware support so I have to leave the original 6600 in addition to whatever AMD card I add, though. Did you install some kind of OFW hack to make it boot without or perhaps yours has a different firmware version to mine?!
Incidentally, Nvidia cards are gonna be a dead end unless you go something pre-500 series which has proper clocking support in Nouveau because you can't use the binary drivers on a PPC.
Note that your game was using softpipe rendering according to the teminal output, I suspect you have some kind of issue with the build of Mesa included with Void. I run Gentoo on mine and the acceleration works fine.
Been hoping for someone to try this! Thank you!! Keep these videos coming! Let’s get hardware acceleration across the whole system!
Nouveau drivers for Big Endian PPC are the most unstable junk I have ever seen. On my 2005 PowerBook 12 inch, I can’t play videos with VLC properly (severe graphical bugs). On ATI GPUs, I can. The OpenBSD/pre-2012 Linux driver “nv” is probably more stable, but it won’t work on modern Linux distros (making the first generation iMac G4s unable to run modern graphical Linux, since nouveau is broken on these). Of course, Nvidia never made drivers for PowerPC CPU, so you can’t use those.
Patches welcome.
@@IanRomanick If only I could write video drivers!
Softpipe is the slow software OpenGL driver in Mesa. You'll want to see radeonsi as the driver. You should check to see what glxinfo says from the command line. It's also possible that distro didn't install the radeonsi driver.
The thing I forgot to mention when I was typing on my phone lol... you can see what drivers its trying to load of you do "LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo > /dev/null".
Seems like there is some sort of hardware incompatibility that happens between the 6000 series Radeon Card and the 200 series (probably between 6000 and 7000 since most of the 200 series except for the highest end ones, are just rebadged 7000 series GPUs.) There as an architecture change between the 6K and the 7K cards. A die shrink too. The 6000 series were the last of the Terascale architecture and the 7000 are the 1st GCN architecture. (except for 7400 and lower which were still Terascale 7500 and up were GCN)
This Old Mac...sound like the tech version of This Old House. 🤣
Doesn't the G5 have a supplemental PCI power like the later intel ones? So the add on PSU is not needed.
And I thought I was crazy putting a Vega 56 in a cheese grater Mac Pro…
That’s hilarious, I was looking for that CD Drive bay PSU when I was building my Mac Pro. They’re rarer than you’d think!
Thank you, I've been waiting for a video like this forever. I.E. latest top of the line g5 with a ridiculous gpu
Yeah, having OpenGL is not an indication that what you're doing is GPU accelerated. As you saw, it's using the MESA rendering engine -- that's a CPU based rendering engine.
"This old Mac" is giving me "This old house" vibes--an old tv show (that's apparently still going) about home remodelling. Maybe "This old Mac" would be a good title for a video series :)
This issue of black screen is a issue of the GPU firmware not being compatible with Open Firmware and on Intel Macs the GPU Firmware mostly not being EFI GOP Conform
Would it be possible to somehow rework the Linux drivers for the 6870 to work in Sorbet Leopard?
Is there a video where you got the hardware acceleration working.
I was wondering what crazy macintosh shenanigans you were going to do for GPUJune2 😂
How do you bounce for 20:33 ? lol Great video and the energy is like a crackhead on crystal drinking Monster energy drinks with a coffee IV going. Thanks for the time it takes to create, edit and UL this content bro!
other thing would just need to leave the old video card in one of the slots as a bootstrap GPU.
I wonder if it would be possible to upgrade the ATI Rage 128 video in the G3 iMacs? (specifically, the graphite and snow).
This is a really cool experiment. You need to ssh in to do more troubleshooting.
were do i get one of those power supply's
I know this video is old and someone probably already said this in the comments but when it comes to Linux it will require the firmware to some devices such as video cards. Some cards can cope without the firmware files but end up with odd colors or lack of 3D acceleration and some cards won't work at all until the kernel detects the firmware. For a example in Debian/Ubuntu a lot of AMD cards require the "firmware-amd-graphics" package. On my PC I forgot all about the firmware and only got a black screen. Had to SSH in and install the firmware then rebooted and finally got video. Never used VOID Linux since I don't like runit as the init system but it wouldn't surprise me it would be the same thing needing drivers/firmware.
Put the cables through the PCIE top bracket hole. You left it open already! Also given the older radeon gpus work I assume a newer driver would be the solution to get the newer radeons working to some extent. There may also be some random other issue for most of the newer cards used (all of them may require newer features like resizeable BAR and such like Jeff Geerling ran into with his raspberry pi gpu shenanigans.) I agree with comments about ssh troubleshooting and adding nouveau to retry some of these. May also help on performance and firefox accel support.
Nouveau doesn't work well with newer cards
This is low key the best channel on RUclips lol
Have a look for the hidden 6-pin power connector on the board, you just need the same kind of adapter from a Mac Pro.
Yep. There is indeed one 6-pin connection in the late 2005 G5
I'd never heard of separate GPU power supplies, BUT when that was made I'm sure there were a lot of cases where folks had perfectly good power supplies that were bought previously to their current (then-new) PCIe motherboards. I currently have a 1200watt power supply, currently powering my 2019 X399 build that I bought subsequent to that and if it isn't showing any obvious signs of error, I'm sure I'll use it for whatever I replace my X399 board with in a couple of years 🤷 (having said that and now thinking about my setup, I may very well replace it with a completely modular PSU, that was the only mistake I made...I mistook "partially modular" for 100% module :/ )
omg cube 2!!! I haven't seen Sauerbraten in so long! I spent so much time playing that game on my old macbook back in the mid 2000's.
Those Nvidia cards didn't work because you have the Radeon driver installed
Maybe you can try to livestream using hardware encoding on the HD 6870. FFmpeg and radeon should support that, I'm not sure though
Is that apple monitor an analog DVI? Modern graphics cards no longer support analog video out, and I noticed all the more recent cards were the ones that didn't work with it. Try the modern monitor with the cards that didn't work.
The 2070 could just be because it's too recent and the firmware isn't there. I don't know how to go about installing firmware on void. You could also try installing the proprietary Nvidia driver ahead of time with a different card
No, the monitor is digital. Analog DVI connectors physically don't fit in digital-only ports.
i worked at tekserve from 2000 to probably around 2004 or 5? Your channel is super nostalgic to me, awesome work, love the topics.
I do hope you don't intend to keep that water cooling solution in there. Even if its more reliable then the early ones, it's still a ticking time bomb especially 20 years later.
are the nouveau drivers available for that platform? Perhaps they can be compiled to give support for the nvidia cards
Love all this. Really cool. Stepping up the e-waste drive. Thumbs up
Should have an ssh server running so you can login from another machine to do a little bit more troubleshooting.
Mesa doesnt compile anything other than softpipe/llvmpipe for PPC64 by default, you have to compile Mesa yourself with radeonsi/nouveau/iris and ANV/NVK/RADV for it to do hw acceleration
I'm thinking there's just a configuration issue with those gpus that ain't working, I've had that black screen issue when moving from a 970 to a 3060, maybe you should do a follow up booting from an usb or something like that
Do you have a way to watt reader to measure the power usage of the PMG5 and the GPU? If so, and you have enough headroom, you could just use molex (or SATA power) to PCIe power cables. I've run computers that way before, and they were fine (though, they didn't haver dual G5s lol).
Sauerbraten! Good memories playing on my intel iMac. I was a part of the Mapping Hell clan.
Think I would use like PICO power supply to save on space.
leave the original card in the machine to see the boot process and have a console to troubleshoot whatever card you're trying
You should have set up Linux to do serial console output so you could troubleshoot xorg
Do you know whats really mind blowing? As Linux 5.15 supports AMD Radeon RX 5000 or even 6000 series directly in kernel as, these are open source, these could work out of the box .... so you could try a RX5700XT, 6700XT or even 6900XT if you can get hold on one. The additinal power supply delivers 450Watts? Should be plenty for any of these cards ... and remember the normal Power supply of the MAC delivers 75Watts via PCIe slot so even a 400 Watts Graphics card could be fine.
15:47 😀 Headbanging! 😂
The Black screen from the other cards might be a resolution issue with the monitor.
I'd try a 8GB RX580, I think you'd actually have a reasonably performant machine.
There are AMD HD Series cards that have 4 and 6 display outputs. Would be cool to see a multi-monitor Mac making use of all those displays.
I messed around with putting a Radeon HD with 2 dual-link DVI ports that was reprogrammed with Barco firmware into a G4 Quicksilver running Leopard (with modifications). It worked, which is about as much excitement as I got out of it. The performance was terrible beyond the second monitor. I’m sure it was driver related but I didn’t know enough at the time to dig in further. I worked in healthcare IT and we had just piles of cool expensive hardware to play with in our downtime. I mostly found amusement in plugging random stuff into other random stuff to see what would happen 😂
Great video :) Wish I had that many spare cards my GPU has started to fail on me and I've been off work sick for 7 weeks so no hope of being able to afford a replacement
I haven’t messed with the pre intel Mac towers at all, but even on the intel Mac Pros 1,1-3,1 they won’t support beyond the HD series from ATI or nvidia past the 600 series. Unless you modify the system in a couple ways due to lacking instructions sets on the CPUs. My 3,1 from 2008 I have modified to run Mojave and use a Vega card with it. Using Nvidia cards on Mac post to their dispute all those years ago is just a bad time.
woah fully modular PSU in 2005 is awesome and probably unheard of
Unfortunately, Void doesn't have acceleration (just software "softpipe") on big-endian PPC.
Does any PPC Linux??
@@methanoid I'm not sure
Hardware acceleration in the browser is a mess on Linux. You actually have to manually turn it on in Firefox and can require separate builds for chromium based browsers. Nvidia seems to be a particular mess. Also, nouveau doesn't ship firmware for Nvidia cards so you might have to put in some work to get things like video acceleration working on older devices. The Nvidia cards in particular require a lot more tweaking, especially on Mac devices.
the problem is with those that have pci-x slots cannot use pcie cards as i tried …pci cards doesnt work in those slot except last slot which is a pci type …so agp is the only way
Mine has a Quadro in it, an RX4500 Quadro to be exact and all I needed was to plug it into another pc that had dedicated graphics and flash it to work with the mac OSX, then plug it into the Quad G5.
Only paid 27 bucka on ebay for the quadro as well.
I can't tell if there's extra PCI Express ports but why not put a working graphics card in with a not working one so you could tinker with it
Question, would you be willing to try this with an Intel arc GPU?
If you want hardware accelerated Firefox on Linux you really want to be using the latest versions since a *lot* of work has gone into making it fully functional and reliable it over the past few years (mostly as a side effect of the WebRender project).
I've been looking for a modern-ish (GCN) AMD gpu for my G5. I mostly settled on a 7850 as it's old enough to be cheaper while also being RadeonSI-supported. That, or something like the R7/R9 270. The G5 can go up to 150W with the mini-6pin to 6pin cable for power, but I'd rather not run right up against that limitation D:
cant go past terascale 3 because amdgpu doesnt work on big endian
@@virtualtools_3021 but there's still the Radeon kernel driver, no? I recall that, when amdgpu was first launched, GCN 1 cards, specifically Southern Islands cards, could enable amdgpu support and blacklist radeon...could one not do the same but in reverse?
That GPU power supply was nicer than I expected. Although part of me wonders if the GPU power cables are starting to get sticky from age. The plastic over them doesn't looks like the kind that stands up to the test of time.
It's just soft PVC, it'll last for 20 years with little degradation and instead of becoming sticky, it first starts to become more stiff and less bendy and eventually affter maybe 40+ years becomes brittle. It can also melt other plastics it gets in touch with if left unventilated.
"If this works, I'll eat a SCSI cable." I have some really big SCSI cables I can send you. LOL
Mi Mac torre G5, me enciende la torre, la pantalla no, da negro total, tampoco enciende el teclado para poder configurarlo, da 2 colores rojos adentro cuando se enciende, me equivoqué en colocar un código para quitar contraseña al dar en enter con esa equivocacion que no me di cuenta, se quedó así como lo estoy escribiendo, estaba funcionando y todo bien, pero le quería quitar la contraseña y me sucedió lo que escribo, el como hacer para que el teclado me funcione y entrar a sus datos.
Be nice to you see a couple game benchmarks ran on the working cards
I had both the G5 and the Godsmack CD back in the day.
Probably the gtx 7xx series and radeon hd works is because both are the last gpu with legacy bios support, the modern ones requires UEFI boot
Would it be possible to modify / reconfigure the VBIOS of any *semi-modern* graphics card such as my 980 ti to work with open firmware natively? Or have a modified version of open firmware to support more graphics cards?
Yep, that's Mac flashing, there's still some people selling the service online. I think MacRumours or some other forum hosts the community made ROMs.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 the bios they are flashing are x86+ so idk if someone can rewrite an entire vbios for open fiormware . now what one can do is flash open bios on these a user named the kitchen sink did that but some moderator closed the forum she was hosting
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 open bios can technically emulate x86 and little endiun so might let these cards work
@@amdintelxsniperx yeah, I will say that there are ways to figure out the differences between Mac and PC versions of GPU firmware, comparing the hex code between them
It's how Mac flashing started, I can see people figuring it out for PowerMacs and patching PC VBIOSes to work with older PPC
Yeah, I dont know why this couldnt work even in text mode. I bet even 2070 u have would work in a pc really old,but with PCI e slot