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AGP4X vs. AGP8X
An anonymous reader writes "With upcoming chipsets such as the SiS648 claiming support for the latest AGP8X standard, we asked ourselves if there were any performance benefits. We took the SiS648 and Xabre 400 reference boards, modified them and compared the results." I can't even get 4x stable under XP, so I figure 8x is
half as likely to let me play NWN :)
2.18 gigabytes a second. Jesus - does anyone else see why this is wierd to me? I mean, I understand the need for faster hardware, but can't software producers just make their software more efficient? I mean, any game I'm playing that requires 2.18gb of data to be passed through my video card each second is going to require a better, faster computer than I've got now. I'm tired of always being forced into upgrading just to play the latest and greatest games - and then being told that I'm breaking the law when I want to play old ones that I can't buy anymore! It's absurd, and it makes perfect sense - too many software companies have a vested interest in hardware - the more advanced the game, the more hardware that sells. What we really need is another Mario Bros. or Tetris to come along to give us all a kick in the face - great games don't need outstanding graphics to be great fun.
According to the article, so far there's only a 4.7% increase between the 4x and 8x cards. Personally, I'd say thats a pretty good start. Of course, I'm still using a GeForce2, TNT2, and Rage128...so as you can see, graphics cards aren't that big of a deal to me.
:(.
:(.
What I get worried about with these upgrades is that they're going to come out with games that actually require them! And them I'm screwed
Personally, I find it interesting that it continues to seem like every card *needs* more bandwidth, more power, etc (and yes, i know these cards operate at lower voltages, but still...). Someday I'm going to need that special SOUNDBLASTER QUASIEXTAGYWITHCHERRIESONTOP made for the SPECIAL SOUND CARD BUS WITH MORE BANDWIDTH. I dread the day when i need a special slot for every type of card i want
So gogo with the ultrauberbandwidth increases, but keep that backwards compatability! I like pci graphics cards sometimes!
Maybe I missed something, but it really would have been nice if they explained how these tests stressed the AGP bus. You're not going to get much of a performance boost out of better AGP unless you're running tests with more textures than can fit in the on-board memory.
Most people will say agp8x is way too much and overkill and will introduce some bugs and firmware/hardware/signal issues with some lower quality cards, etc...
:)
Well, when AGP 1x was out, people didn't find it very useful because it wasn't fast enough
AGP2x was okay to offload the PCI bus and do some basic stuff, but not fast enough for high-speed games and transfering large chunks of information.
AGP4x seems to be okay for today's technology and all, and AGP8X seems to be way overkill, but I personnaly think that it's finally what it should have been since the start: a *VERY* fast graphics port on which the bandwidth bottlenect doesn't become an issue, * at any resolutions * , and that help cutting down the cost in other fields beside gaming. (one example: uncompressed video editing 1600x1200@24bits(or more for film and with newer card with better colorspace) @60FPS) Right now you require exotic hardware for this, especially for uncompressed playback. let's say you'd want to invest on a fast Ultra320 array (ok you'll say if you do so you can afford the exotic hardware as well, but the point here is actually CUTTING down the price, and this is one way), well now you could get way more drives for your system.
There are many more examples for this, but the main idea is there are new features that are going to come out for cards, bigger bitdepth, better this and that, that's going to choke the bandwidth and 256MB on a card won't be enough in a not so distant future, using system memory at almost local memory speed increases quality and possibilities tremendously, and while we don't see much use right now, I'm sure it won't take long after 8x is installed that we'll see a use for 12x or 16x
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
"[...]there's actually quite a bit of advantage with AGP8X especially at lower resolutions."
What are these people smoking? The vast majority of the tests are all but identical. The VERY BEST performance difference is 3DMark2001SE Pro at 800x600x16, and it shows a whopping 4.7% improvement.
Clue: In the current 3D world, AGP4X IS NOT a constraint. Even AGP2X is fine. Hell, there was an early version of the (TNT2 or GeForce 1, I forget which) that was *PCI*, for chrissake, and it was only a whisker slower than the AGP cards at the time.
Geometry transfer, it would appear, just isn't very bandwidth intensive. The only time the AGP rate is going to matter much is when doing very heavy texturing from main memory, but that just isn't happening. Instead, manufacturers are putting more and more RAM on the video card instead, and all the games are oriented around pre-loading all necessary textures in that specialized, super-high-speed RAM.
At the present 1.06 MB/sec transfer rate of AGP 4X, that means that the entire video RAM of a 128MB card be filled in roughly 1/10th of a second. If you spend all the time, money, and effort to upgrade to AGP 8X, you can improve your load time by 1/20th of a second.
Just think...if you played 50 levels of some FPS a day, every day, you'd save over 15 minutes in your first year alone!
Obviously, this is a very important technology we should all rush out to buy. Thanks, hardwarezone.com! I'll trust you for all my technology reviews in future.
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AGP8X: Saving your time so efficiently, you won't even notice.
It seems like the editors have a particular list of text strings they grep all incoming submissions for, apparently among these is AGP8x. This comparison is ridiculous even for Rob to point heedlessly to. The wbesite itself is Yet Another Anandtech/Tom's Hardware ripoff design with an article that reads like a SiS fanboy on crack.
The whining and crying about AGP 8x is a bit premature and the AGP 3.0 standard has been pretty much supplanted in usefulness by graphics card manufacturers. Having a dedicated high speed port for graphics hooked up to the northbridge is a good design idea. It frees the traditionally low bandwidth nb-sb connection from needing to carry lots of graphics data. The memory sharing available in AGP has become increasingly useless as worthwhile graphics cards have scads of local memory now. About the only thing an AGP apeture is good for is an i845G chipset board or some other cheap piece of shit HPaq sticks in their computers.
The AGP 2.0 spec isn't much of a bottleneck either. Case in point, replacing the TNT2 based video card in my dual P3 500 with a GF2GTS more than doubled the 3DMark2001 SE score from 926 to 2068. The board is an IWill DBD-100 with a 2x AGP port on it. The fillrate or poly rendering ability was not adversely affected by the AGP 2x port, the only thing keeping the 3DMark score down is the relatively slow processors (as 3DMark is single threaded) and the low FSB bandwidth.
The fillrate of an ATi R300 or nVidia NV30 isn't going to affected much by an AGP bandwidth on ONLY 1GB/s. Most cards based on these chips will end up having >100MB of on board memory. It won't be too terribly long before the video card in the PC has more and faster memory than the system's main memory. Even Doom3's 80MB of textures isn't going to really stress a 4x AGP card, it would take all of a seventh of a second to transfer all 80MB of textures. Maybe AGP 8x will be on my upgrade path when the load time of a game's textures take a perceptible amount of time to load into the video card's local memory.
Rob it isn't Microsoft's fucking fault your AGP card doesn't work properly, you're probably stuck with some old VA Lin^H^H^HSoftware POS box. My system doesn't have any problems running reliably under Windows XP and I don't think too many other people running Windows 2000 or XP are having too many problems either. When do we get to mod the editors as -1 Troll?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.