Severe Problems with ATI Displays 4.5 and ATI Radeon X800 Mac Edition Graphics Card

Two weeks ago, we finally got our ATI Radeon X800 Mac Edition graphics card, the hottest graphics card for the Mac according to early tests. We had ordered our card in early February but ATI's initial supply was limited and it was depleted quickly. So we waited 2 months to test it against our Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL with our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 and 30" Cinema Display.

When it arrived, we quickly installed it and briefly tried it out. At the settings that we play Call of Duty and Halo, the X800 was a few fps faster than the 6800 Ultra. We had planned to do a full test the following weekend for publication last Monday but Mac OS X 10.3.9 came out so we delayed our plans until this past weekend. Last week, ATI released a new firmware update for the X800 and an ATI Displays update to 4.5. Wanting to use the latest software in our review and tests, we updated our X800's firmware and installed ATI Displays 4.5 late last week. On reboot, we got a kernel panic...!

The kernel panic (dark gray screen telling one to restart in several languages) happened every time we rebooted at exactly the same spot, right after the gray screen with dark gray Apple logo. Sometimes that was where the G5 froze and sometimes despite the kernal panic it continued booting to a blue screen or partial desktop but the G5 was always frozen, i.e. no cursor movement from the mouse or keyboard.

We tried resetting NVRAM and PRAM but it did not fix the problem. We booted from a backup drive and exchanged the new ATI ROM Xtender (1.2.4f3) installed with ATI Displays 4.5 with the one installed with ATI Displays 4.4 (1.1.3) and got the G5 to boot successfully several times but then G5 once again succombed to the kernel panic on startup. Unfortunately, the firmware update is not reversible, at least not yet.

This is apparently a fairly widespread problem (see this Accelerate Your Mac web page) but not everyone encounters it. Our service ticket with ATI remains open. We had hoped a fix would be forthcoming before this past weekend but it wasn't. We'll report when a solution is found and conduct our speed tests right after. [Bill Fox]