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AGP Texture Download Problem Revealed
EconolineCrush writes "The latest high-end graphics cards are capable of rendering games at 1600x1200 in 32-bit color at jaw-dropping frame rates, but that might be all they're good for. For all their gaming prowess, all of these cards have horrific AGP download speeds that realize only 1/100th of their theoretical peak. This article lays it all out, testing video cards from ATI, Matrox, and NVIDIA, and clearly illustrates just how bad the problem is. While these cards have no problems rendering images to your screen, you're out of luck if you want to capture those images with any kind of reasonable frame rate via the AGP bus."
Hey, I just realized that my high-end printing device has absolutely no hardware provision for reverse-direction printing! If I want to take the high quality document I just printed and put it back into electronic form, I have to spend hundreds of dollars* for a completely separate "scanning" device! What a ripoff!
:)
Really, as soon as the market for this sort of capture starts to grow, someone will have a hardware solution. The first ones will be cheesy: a connecter into a separate PCI capture card, for example; but eventually a more reasonable method will become standard design.
To me, this is just the free market in action, working (more or less) as it should be.
* I know how much scanners cost. Think hyperbole.