Power Mac G3 graphics

Before ATI was bought by AMD they had legacy drivers posted for download. That disappeared with the buy-out. However, sometimes an e-mail to AMD support could get you old ATI drivers. Worth a try.

Adding VRAM to the logic board slot does not gain you much, and PCI vidcards may be easier to find. The only reason to bump the onboard VRAM to its max of 6MB is if you want to run dual monitors. As your can't use two video cards (the the "electron budget" comments below) the logic port port becomes important for dual monitors.

My first upgrade card for my Beige was a retail ATI Rage Orion 16MB. There was also an ATI Rage Nexus with 32MB, but the best card was the original Radeon Mac Edition 32MB that kahjot mentions. I have one of those too. It was expensive so was quickly superseded by the Radeon Mac Edition 7000 which was not as capable a card, but they tend to get advertised as "original" on some sites. You can easily tell the original RME from the RME 7000 if you have one in hand or have a proper photo. The RME has a cooling fan on the main processor heat sink where the RME 7000 has only a heat sink.

The last Beige-compatible card was the Radeon Mac Edition 9200 with 128MB VRAM. I have one in my most upgraded Beige but all is not perfect. The 9200 came out just as OSX was releasing and ATI had to delay release of the RME 9200 to decide what system they would support. They decided to go with OSX support and it was very difficult to get the card to work worthy of its cost under OS9. Even OSX wasn't completely smooth. As PCI on the Beige did not support Quartz Extreme technology the 2D performance of the card was rather kludgy. Dragging and opening windows was choppy, but OSX 3D games were pretty awesome. Descent 3 was stunning with that card.

Yes, you could enable Quartz Extreme with a hack but the hack commonly made other PCI cards work poorly or not at all. You plan to have other cards so I don't see that as an option.

Remember the PCI "electron budget." Technically the Beige's three slots combined can support 45W but in real life the limit is about 40W. Most vidcards are 25W so make sure your other cards don't exceed a total of 15W. The classic combo was 25W vidcard, a 10W FireWire, and a 5W USB. If your USB and FW cards combined are rated at more than 15W, consider a single combo card.

Speaking of USB cards, the biggest headaches we had "in the day" were USB cards that had the OPTI chipset. They seldom worked right in a Mac and often drew more power from the PCI bus than they should have. The most common troublesome cards were Belkin. Go for one with the NEC chipset. They have "NEC" prominently silkscreened on the largest chip on the card. Sonnet used NEC. I have a McAlly UH2-222 that is NEC in my upgraded Beige, and I believe Orange Micro cards also used NEC chips. If a card is not silkscreened with NEC, the odds are good it's an OPTI.

I glad you're here, Chris. Trips down Memory Lane keep my brain exercised!

The Original Radeon PCI card for Mac should work; if you are not in a hurry, you might find one on eBay. It needs to be the Mac Edition card, not a PC card. I doubt that AMD has the drivers available for download anymore.

http://lowendmac.com/2001/ati-radeon-mac-edition-pci/

You should probably post a WTB request on the Low End Mac Swap List, stating that you need a beige G3-compatible PCI card and drivers.

A "flashed" third-party-manufactured Radeon 7000 will provide much better graphics than the earlier ATI "Rage" versions, because it had DDR memory (compared to SGRAM). For OS 9.x, I ran the downloadable (circa 2001) ATI installer package, which was a little more up-to-date than OS 9.x's built-in support for the card. There was native support for the Radeon in OS 10.2.x. Unfortunately, an original Radeon Mac Edition doesn't show up on ebay very often now, nor does the final PCI version that ATI marketed for Macs, the Radeon 9200. Good luck with the card.

I still have a beige Powermac G3 in my storage, which I used for several years about 13 years ago. I too installed OSX 10.2 and iI remember correctly, there used to be a tool named XPostFacto, that even allows you to install 10.4 on that machine. The graphics adapter I used was an ATI Radeon 7000 for PC patched with the necessary Mac ROM. This was the fasted 32-bit PCI graphics card available for this Mac at the time. The on-board graphics is too slow regardless of 2 of 4 MB VRAM and only matters if installed the AV card. My suggestion however is to look on eBay for a PowerMac G5. For the money you spend to upgrade this old Mac, you can easily get a more recent G5. All 68k games I know run fine in Rosetta, unless they require less than 256 (8 bit) color graphics.

you can even hook up 4 displays, the ATI 7000 can mirror the VGA display to the RCA/S-video out,

https://www.macworld.com/article/1004789/radeon7000.html

"At any given time, the DVI connector can be used in conjunction with the two analog connectors to maintain two separate video signals, enabling you to use the Radeon 7000 as a "dual-head" video card. In fact, you can even output video on both analog connectors simultaneously, making it possible to hook up three video devices simultaneously -- as long as you don't mind your VGA monitor mirroring what's on the TV."

some of the G3's had a WINGS personality card with A/V in/out ports as an option to the standard audio-only in/out card. If you ever use the video capture ports on one of those cards, you have to put the live capture window on the monitor connected to the on-board video. I never could get more than a short clip to capture successfully before the video would lag the audio, very frustrating to convert old home Hi8 camcorder to digital video. I ended up using a totally different external USB video capture device on a G4 MDD for that project.

Glad you are still enjoying the G3, that was my main computer for many years, and went through many upgrades. I had it bootable under Mac OS 8, 9, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 over the years, and even MkLinux. I found a lot of good resources as XLR8YourMac.com but may be hard to find the compatible/discontinued parts mentioned in the articles on that web site.

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/

It's reassuring to know that someone wants to spend $$ to upgrade a beige G3 in 2017. I still grouse over pouring so much $ into my fleet of beige G3s, about 15 years ago. They're all in beautiful condition, but I can't bring myself to take them to the e-cycle center just yet. I equipped each with the Radeon 7000 graphics card (a mixture of 32 MB & 64 MB cards), all but one of which were ATI retail-boxed PC versions that I reprogrammed to use in a Mac. I installed a FireWire PCI card and an IOGEAR 2-port USB 2.0 PCI card in all, with the latter capable of providing the faster speed under Mac OS 10.2.8. While the flashed ATI graphics cards were once abundant on ebay, they are much more scarce now, but this seller still has one listed here. With free shipping, it's probably the best deal you'll find. Judging by the style heatsink, that card looks like a Sapphire graphics card, which was a "Powered by ATI" card, and not manufactured by ATI. ATI licensed its technology to third-party manufacturers. If you also install a DVD-ROM or DVD±RW drive and you can still find and download the patched version of Apple DVD Player 1.7, you can watch DVD movies on your beige G3 (266 MHz or faster), running OS 9.x. The early versions (1.x) of Apple's DVD Player required hardware-based MPEG decoding, but the patched version uses software decoding. As for selecting a bootable optical drive, the older Pioneer DVD±RW (8x, 12x, or 16x) drives were the most compatible in older Apple products. When they went to 18x ATAPI DVD±RW drives, Pioneer-branded drives were manufactured by Asus and the quality wasn't comparable to the older models.

Is there a downside to the Radeon 7000 compared to the original Radeon? Issues with Mac OS X?

I jumped from the original RME to the 9200 and never had a 7000. As I recall if was decent enough but benchmarked a fair bit behind the orig RME. I believe it worked under both OS versions.

The big player in comparing video card performance back then was barefeats.com. They had an extensive test comparing the RME to the RME 7000. It's not up on the site any more but the site appears active and the guy who does it, Rob, posts an e-mail contact. I'd write him about the old RME v RME 7000 test and ask if he can send you the information if it is still laying about his office.