ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card and G5 Mac under Leopard

Posted on by Hal Mueller

The ATI 9600 AGP card does not appear to be a good choice for upgrading the graphics on a dual G5 Mac.

Yesterday and today I went through at least a dozen cycles of shut down computer, open computer, swap graphics cards, close computer, reboot in safe mode, reboot in normal mode, in a failed attempt to upgrade my dual G5 Mac desktop’s graphics card. I’d really like to get my 30″ Cinema Display connected to this machine.

I just got off the phone with a senior support tech at ATI/AMD. He told me that there are known issues with this particular card in a G5 running the latest sub-version of Leopard (10.5.5). He suggested that I revert the computer to 10.5.4 or earlier, which I am not willing to do.

I asked about driver updates. They are no longer provided separately by ATI. The senior tech I spoke with says he believes there will be a compatible driver update in Leopard 10.5.6. I’m just going to RMA the card. I’ll just live with the older graphics card, and the smaller monitor, until I replace this G5 with an 8 core Intel Power Mac (how many days until MacWorld?).

5 thoughts on “ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card and G5 Mac under Leopard”

  1. I haven’t updated the driver. Card appears ok. ( I have a dual G5 Mac tower with 8 gigs ram ). I do get a little ( 1/4 inch ) area that doesn’t seem to clear on whatever I have up. ( like a redraw problem ). I’m glad I saw your post in that I was going to update my driver today. I went through a similar problem with little snitch hanging up my system until I used app-zapper and removed it.

  2. Hi- I have an Imac G5 that is experiencing similar problems. If I run the disk utility from the system CD- everything appears to be in working order. It is a 2 ghz and it had 1.5 gb ram- and I saw somewhere that sometimes different size ram sticks can cause a stutter of sorts. I just replaced the 512mb with a 1gb stick (2 gb total)- and it still gets hung up on many graphic generated programs: screensaver (standard apple issue light spiral) online games, online video, large photoshop files, etc. From what I have read, the graphics card is not replaceable on the Imac G5- without replacing the logic board. I’m wondering if either of you had luck with drivers and app-zapper? And can you point me in any direction for app-zapper?
    Thanks

  3. I had a similar problem. We’ve had this card in a G5 running Tiger without any problems in one of our labs. When we put 10.5 on it, it started acting a little glitchy, but still worked. We’ve since pulled the surviving G5’s out of the lab (most just died) and I was using the one with the ATI card as a test box. The graphics started out at a decent resolution and then it dropped to 800×600, then to 640×480 after a few reboots later. While testing Netboot, but not installing anything, the resolution dropped to 640×480 and claimed 256 colors but was actually black and white. I found this solution, just tried it and it works.

    Ati Radeon problems and solution…

    There is a missing extension in System/Library/Extensions/AppleNDRV(folder).

    For those who have Ati Radeon 9600 PC and Mac Edition (maybe for other card also), ATI ROM Xtender is missing in Leopard causing sleep and display problems. The AppleNDVR folder contain only two extensions (AtiDriver.bundle and ATIRuntimeDriver.bundle). You need ATI ROM Xtender from Tiger to have a correct display. Just put it in the folder and restart.

    Luckily we still have a few older machines that couldn’t handle 10.5 still running 10.4.

  5. I have a G5 running 10.4.11 and upgraded it to 10.5.8. I have a ATI Radeon 9600 256 MB AGP card. When I updated the desktop was dark and distorted.I contacted AMD and got no-ware. I tried Doug’s solution presto works like a charm. I can’t thank you enough.

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