I read that Apple are replacing the AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphic card in the later 2011 iMac free of charge because of problems, is this a good choice to upgrade my dead 4850 graphic card in 2009 EMC 2309 iMac or is there an alternative? Any help much appreciated!
I am SO GLAD to see this post. I just upgraded my 2009 imac to a radeon 6750 and it was confirmed working, confirmed compatible in lots of posts, I saw so many posts saying it would indeed be compatible?? but it hangs on the launcher when booting High sierra. I get video, i get to install and setup high sierra without hangup, UNTIL it's time to boot, then it hangs on a white spinning animation that never progresses.
Radeon Hd 4850 For Mac
I tried to install Lucid on the new Apple Imac27" with ATI radeon HD 4850 video card. After selected "install", the screen goes black. few investigations later, I discovered display output switch to the Mini Display Port. So, I tried to connect a second screen, and I was right : just after select "install lucid", the video output switch to the second screen, and the main screen turn black.
I continue my installation using my 2nd screen (connected to the mini display port), and after it, I'm on the desktop. I activate Open radeon drivers, they works perfectly, but in the second screen (Vsync is perfect, and very smooth using compiz). Impossible to switch to the main screen. It's not recognized, and stay black.
I tried proprietary ati drivers (10.6). With them, I can activate my main screen, but they are not better than the open ones : there is a big vsync bug. Actually, It's totally impossible for a normal user to use open ati drivers on the main screen with an Imac27 and ati radeon 4850 graphic card.
I think issue is in the kms driver, I tried to deactivate them. Main screen is recognized, but impossible to turn it on, it stay black, and Vsync issue re-appear on the second screen. Maybe the open radeon drivers also got a bug, cause after deactivate them, my main screen is now recognized on display manager, but impossible after activate it, it stay black => back to proprietary drivers, and the Vsync issue)
I've got round the problem for my system by doing two things:1 connecting an external monitor through the Mini Display port.2 Using F6 on the grub boot menu to add options - radeon.modeset=0 nomodeset
I don't know if the radeon modesetting works on the external monitor (LG1710, has worked OK on a Mac Mini but will test it on iMac) but it certainly doesn't work on the main monitor.I've only tried live CDs so far; in 'xrandr' the main monitor is identified as eDP-0 and it lists the full range of supported resolutions up to 1920x1080.
I believe I have the same problem with a Mid 2010 21.5-inch iMac (serial ends in DAS). Trying to boot from a Mint 10 Live DVD, screen goes black early in the boot process. If I put 'nomodeset' or 'radeon.modeset=0' on the boot line I see text until after the "welcome to Linux Mint" message, command line prompt appears, then after some delay it goes to black screen again. If I put 'text' on the boot line I can boot into text mode and text display remains visible. I do not have an external display readily available to check if output is switching there.
I have established that my main physical screen (iMac display) is detected by the OS radeon driver as output eDP-0, name 'Color LCD', and it is connected but not lit. The external physical screen is detected as output DisplayPort-0, name 'L1710B', and is connected *and* is lit.Both these outputs are connected to logical (X) screen 0 and they both fit into the viewport of 1920x1080.
The screenshot below from Flickr user Andrew Durdin (used with permission) illustrates Portal performance improvements by comparing them between Windows 7 and Mac OS X before and after the Snow Leopard Graphics Update. Durdin saw frame rates either double or triple while running Portal at 2560 by 1440 resolution with high quality settings on a 27-inch 2.66GHz quad-core Core i5 iMac with a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850. The resulting frame rates are much, much closer to performance parity with the Windows version, and well within respectable, playable thresholds.
You may already know about one of AMD's new cards: the Radeon HD 4850. It briefly appeared for sale on Amazon, complete with specs, before eventually getting pulled off the site. It turns out that other retailers in Europe not only listed the card early but started selling them early. In an effort to make its performance embargoes meaningful, AMD moved some dates around.
Here's the deal: AMD is launching its new RV770 GPU next week, and just as the RV670 that came before it, it will be available in two versions. The first version we can talk about today: that's the Radeon HD 4850. The second version, well, just forget that I even mentioned that - you'll have to wait until the embargo lifts for more information there.
But we can't really talk about the Radeon HD 4850, we can only tell you how it performs and we can only tell you things you would know from actually having the card. The RV770 architectural details remain under NDA until next week as well. What we can tell you is how fast AMD's new $199 part is, but we can't tell you why it performs the way it does.
What we've got here is the polar opposite of what NVIDIA just launched on Monday. While the GT200 is a 1.4 billion transistor chip found in $400 and $650 graphics cards, AMD's Radeon HD 4850 is...oh wait, I can't tell you the transistor count quite yet. Let's just say it's high, but not as high as GT200 :)
Again, we're not allowed to go into the architectural details of the RV770, the basis for the Radeon HD 4800 series including today's 4850, but we are allowed to share whatever data one could obtain from having access to the card itself, so let's get started.
Running GPU-Z we see that the Radeon HD 4850 shows up as having 800 stream processors, up from 320 in the Radeon HD 3800 series. Remember that the Radeon HD 3800 was built on TSMC's 55nm process and there simply isn't a smaller process available for AMD to use, so the 4800 most likely uses the same manufacturing process. With 2.5x the stream processor count, the RV770 isn't going to be a small chip, while we can't reveal transistor count quite yet you can make a reasonable guess.
Comparative analysis of AMD Radeon HD 6770M and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 Mac Edition videocards for all known characteristics in the following categories: Essentials, Technical info, Video outputs and ports, Compatibility, dimensions and requirements, API support, Memory. Benchmark videocards performance analysis: PassMark - G3D Mark, PassMark - G2D Mark, Geekbench - OpenCL, CompuBench 1.5 Desktop - Face Detection (mPixels/s), CompuBench 1.5 Desktop - Ocean Surface Simulation (Frames/s), CompuBench 1.5 Desktop - T-Rex (Frames/s), CompuBench 1.5 Desktop - Video Composition (Frames/s), CompuBench 1.5 Desktop - Bitcoin Mining (mHash/s), GFXBench 4.0 - Manhattan (Frames), GFXBench 4.0 - T-Rex (Frames), GFXBench 4.0 - Manhattan (Fps), GFXBench 4.0 - T-Rex (Fps), 3DMark Fire Strike - Graphics Score.
The problem is as follow. Unless I pass the kernel parameter "nomodeset" or "radeon.modeset=0" the screen goes black immedeatly after initializing "Virtual Console". Though I can do a blind login and reboot after this, so it apprears to just be a video problem.
I have seen someone posting that running "modprobe -r drm" and then "modprobe -v radeon modeset=1" would work, and did it as described in =158161 however, the screen goes black again when the radeon module is inserted.
So, to summarize, my problem is as follows:1. Unless I boot with kernel option nodemodesett or radeon.modeset = 0, screen goes black during init.2. If I disable modesetting the radeon module won't load properly.
I'm having the exact same issue you describe. I'm on an iMac 27 with radeon 4850 GPU, only difference is mines the 2011 model. The crazy part is I've actually tried Arch Linux, Debian (testing and stable), and Ubuntu and got the same result. That Debian stable is using a 3.2 kernel and still wont boot correctly is baffling.
Also tried the edid thing and got the same effect. Things got interesting once I plugged in an external monitor via the mini displayport. When the radeon module loads the display output is moving itself to the externel screen, and works fine from there including X. Im under the impression that its moving output to the display port whether or not theres anything plugged into it. So it's sending video output to a nonexistent externel display if nothing is plugged into the displayport.
I had the exactly same issue last weekend when I tried to install Arch on my late 2009 iMac with ATI 4850 512MB graphical card. After hours of work, I still not able to boot into graphical interface by the exactly same methods used by OP. I did some research that someone saying the perpoitery Catalyst driver may work. However, the HD2.3.4xxx series are no longer supported by the latest catalyst driver and had to choose the legacy driver at AUR. The legacy driver requires kernel version older than 3.19 and xorg-server version older than 1,13, and also some other dependencies. It is worth trying, but I won't have a try on it any more, I've spent too much time on that. Let me know if that method will work.
Thanks for your information. Are you saying that the radeon module could work without problem under LTS kernel? I remembered I tried but still end up with no luck. I will have it a try again when I am back home. Do I need to do the edid stuff?
Yeah the linux-lts kernel is working for me with the open radeon drivers, but only when an external monitor is plugged into the minidisplay port. If I try to boot that setup with the displayport unplugged I get the black screen on the internal monitor, but when plugged in both monitors work perfectly. You can even disable the external monitor in your Desktop Environment settings post-boot if you dont want/need it. 2ff7e9595c
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