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

Drivers, not hardware

[overshoot]

I know I shouldn't have read the article, but

The problem isn't the hardware, it's the software drivers. In fact, the speed could be dramatically increased with revised software drivers. However, no manufacturer has presently made this aspect of driver performance a priority.

It looks like this is primarily a Microsoft-drivers problem. I wonder if anyone has looked at whether the XFree86 and DRM drivers could do better.

Bogus benefits!

[Adnans]

* Their graphics cards would become invaluable for rendering production output for TV, film and video

Oh yeah, the current market for this is huuuge, NOT! When and if the need arises I'm sure the card manufacturers will address this. Right now it's FPS that count and I don't think GFX companies are going to waste engineering time on this useless feature without any significant return on investment.

* Users could actually record game output in real-time with little impact on game performance. After playing there could be a compressed movie of your game play saved on your HD. On a reasonably fast machine you could actually record your game play digitally to your DV camcorder as you play or even compress and burn it to a Video CD or DVD at the same time you are actually playing

This one is just silly. Why not record the game engine commands instead of the videocard output? Oh wait, that has been possible for years in most FPS games no? What these people are proposing is to capture high resolution images, compress (eeks), and them stream out to a TV screen that probably has only 1/3 the resolution of the original capture. What a great way to waste time!

* Screen capture software that grabs motion images of user interfaces for the purposes of tutorials and training is a vital business application

Haha, this one takes the cake. Most of these tutorials do not need high FPS numbers to be usefull at all. And even more importantly, a lot of these applications simply script the real application to demonstrate the needed behaviour. You can't beat that.

* Despite the popularity of Internet streaming, it is not currently possible to stream live output from graphics cards over the Internet. The connections, processors and codecs are all fast enough today. Sadly, all of this horsepower is being held back by one remaining weak link: the texture download speed of today's graphics card drivers.

Woehahhahaa :-)

I'd rather fetch a UDP stream of game engine commands render the game action on my side of the Internet, thank you very much.

What a joke :)

-adnans