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."

Comments

Imagine That

[mosch]

Wow, what a surprise. Video cards being built on ultra-thin margins are only being designed for the use that 99.99% of the population wants to use them for. You'd think with their huge 4% and 5% profits they'd add in lots of features that only a very few people want, just in case!

In summary, who the fuck cares?

It's not the cards

[tmark]

all of these cards have horrific AGP download speeds that realize only 1/100th of their theoretical peak...you're out of luck if you want to capture those images with any kind of reasonable frame rate via the AGP bus."

As the quoted article clearly indicates, the problem lies with the drivers and not with the cards, the latter which the original poster intimates.

And the underlying reason is immediately understandable: after years of AGP cards and years of noone really complaining raising this issue - (except, now, developers of video-editing software who could benefit) - it seems clear that there isn't much demand for this kind of performance. In the (near ?) future there might be, but why should these companies spend money working on driver performance in areas like this when really customers only care about how well Quake will run ?

When people are willing to pay for these features is when companies will pay to build the requisite drivers. And that is how it should be.

Perhaps...

[ColGraff]

"What kind of idiot puts their most powerful processor at the end of a one way street?"

Maybe they're the kind of idiots who know most people just want the best possible OUTPUT for gaming possible, and so don't want to add any overhead in card performance - or even additional design time - that isn't related to gaming performance. You know, the idiots who make cards that get award after award from gaming companies, then write near-perfect drivers, port those drivers to linux, and let you overclock the card to your heart's content. Those sort of idiots. My, they're idiotic.

Nobody says, "buy a geforce 4 ti, make the next toy story." No, it's advertised as a gaming card, and that's what its designed to do. If you want to do high-end video rendering things, perhaps a gaming card isn't the best choice.