Tackling AGP 8X

EconolineCrush writes "AGP 8X is popping up in new chipsets and motherboards, and graphics cards are also starting to support the standard, but is there a major performance advantage over the older AGP 4X spec? According to this review of NVIDIA's latest AGP 8X-enable graphics products, no. The review also covers some of AGP 8X's new functionality, which includes support for multiple AGP ports with multiple AGP devices per port. Whether future games and applications take advantage of AGP 8X's extra bandwidth remains to be seen, but more interesting should be what companies do with multiple AGP devices and ports."

Comments

lack of performance

[Zod000]

I dont recall seeing much of an increase from agp 2x to agp 4x either so I'm no surprised

Re:lack of performance

[Zeinfeld]

Ability to have multiple displays on the bus would be useful. There really is no good solution for multiple head systems, particularly if you want as many monitors as I tend to. Basically double headed cards tend to offer either TV out or second monitor, not both.

Re:lack of performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, especially since decent PCI video cards are becoming rare. Last I checked, the best PCI card you could get was either a Radeon (the original one, no 7000, 8500, or 9000) or the occasional Geforce2 MX, and they were virtually non-existant in retail stores.

Re:lack of performance

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI Radeon 7500 64MB DDR PCI Graphics Card

Dual display (DVI, S-Video, analog), DirectX 8.0 and OpenGL supported, etc.

Re:lack of performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe all advances in computing should be logarithmic.

Re:lack of performance

[AnyoneEB]

Don't buy ATI Radeons for duel-head! I have an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro and the second monitor has a shadow on it, not unusable, but annoying. Matrox has duel-head that acutally works, but their latest duel-head card is getting a bit old.

Re:lack of performance

[jred]

WinFast GeForce2 MX DH Pro

I have this card, and it works rather well. I guess the Geforce2 is getting kind of dated, but it works well w/ my 1.2g Athlon. Couple this w/ a PCI card (dual-head or not) or two, and you should be able to have as many monitors as you want.

Re:lack of performance

[kingOFgEEEks]

i have radeon 7500, and i do not have this problem. possibly an issue with the 9000, but not all ati cards. i still will likely not buy another ati card, because as far as drivers go, they suck. (my 7500 didn't even ship with working win2k drivers)

Re:lack of performance

[Octal]

My Radeon VE dualheads just fine.

Re:lack of performance

[Gabrill]

Don't forget TV captuer applications. They could always use a little extra bandwidth.

Re:lack of performance

[Zeinfeld]

Dual display (DVI, S-Video, analog), DirectX 8.0 and OpenGL supported, etc.

Only two heads????

So I have to ut the other monitors on cheezy pCI cards which are getting harder to find, especially if you want something with decent power.

Re:lack of performance

[evil_one]

I have a PCI BT878, and full-motion capture is a no-performance-hit task on my system, at 640x480 - a resolution higher than NTSC spec. AGP for this is a waste.

Re:lack of performance

[fault0]

Because the current crop of games doesn't benefit from AGP 4x. Not sure about ut2k3 though, it might be modern enough to.

Re:lack of performance

[gl4ss]

i kinda thought it would affect the transfer speeds (of textures, and vertexes and likes) anyways. and agp4x is like what, 1,5-2 years old soon?

about performance.. when agp first came they dubbed it to be fast enough to use textures from system memory without slowdown(AS IF).

Re:lack of performance

[rtscts]

AGP is a port not a bus.. if you want another AGP card you need another AGP controller, and another set of AGP tracks on the mobo.

Re:lack of performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone recall VESA Bus architectures?
They developed because the ISA bus was too slow for graphics. This AGP development is following the same trend. VESA died because PCI was faster.

PCI started looking slow so AGP was made. AGP has too many shortcoming so we will add ports, increase speed, etc. I bet, like VESA Bus, it will die soon-- replaced by a faster general purpose bus.

Re:lack of performance

[Oculus Habent]

AGP 8x could change that with multiple devices per port...

And it would be kind of cool to buy a motherboard with 4 AGP, 3 PCI...

Re:lack of performance

[rtscts]

IDE did the same thing with multiple drives per port (master/slave). I'd be very suprised if a similar addon hack for AGP turns out any better than it did for IDE, esp. considering AGP was designed for max speed rather than min cost, of a single device.

Re:lack of performance

[Gabrill]

Why limit ourselves to 640x480? Already, higher resolution video feed is available for capture, such as digital cable. Mind you I haven't tried to capture this, but I'm sure _someone_ would eventually want to.

Re:lack of performance

[evil_one]

That's not any higher a resolution.
HDTV has a higher resolution' but there are no commercial HDTV decoders available yet. Even if they were, however, the PCI bus can handle that bandwith with ease.

AGP8

[Nonillion]

That would be cool to have more than one AGP slot. I am sometimes disapointed that I cannot have two dual headed agp cards installed...

Re:AGP8

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife (and girlfriends) really appreciate my dual "heads"....

Re:AGP8

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of NV30s in a single PC!!

Re:AGP8

[neur0maniak]

Does anyone remember the old Voodoo2, with SLI (Scan Line Interleave) you could combine two together to get twice the performance, and even a higher video mode.

But with SLI Voodoo2's you could only have one output. They had something like a loop-through cable that connected them from the outside, as well as the SLI cable that connected them from the inside.

Well, my point is, that couldn't you combine the power of two AGP cards, to get twice the performance, twice the video RAM?

we would need it

[Anonymous Coward]

While things like AGP 8x are useless today, we might need them tomorrow. When AGP 4x would be starving cards.

Nothing new here

[gnillort]

AGP 8x == small bridge to PCI-X == waste of money

Re:Nothing new here

[Usquebaugh]

Why do you say PCI-X is a waste of money? I'm eagerly wating an increase in PCI bandwidth.

Re:Nothing new here

[yukster]

He meant that AGP 8X is a waste of money cuz it's just a stopgap until PCI-X comes out... that you might as well just wait for PCI-X.

Re:Nothing new here

[LoRdTAW]

PCI Express is what I am waiting for. If you don't know PCI Express is a serial
version of PCI that is electrically similar to Infiniband. It also supposedly shares with
Infiniband protocol too. so far only 266MBps links have been discussed but that can
scale to 1 and 3 GBps per port. Each port is switched like an ethernet switch giving
each device its own 266MBps+ bandwidth. AGP 8X is fast but who knows what
tomorrow graphics cards will bring and what games will tax them.

Re:Nothing new here

[LoRdTAW]

PXI-X is here. The fastest speed so far is 133MHz with an effective bandwidth of 1
GBps. AGP 8X is double that. Not saying that double the speed means double the
performance but it allows for growth and will be standard so it isn't a waste of
money if your buying/building a new PC.

Re:Nothing new here

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

SGI XIO still beats it...and it's been around since 1997
My Octane, with its 195 MHz R10000 CPU, can drive 1.6 GBps both to and from any given XIO port (and ports can communicate independently without bothering the CPU too).
If I upgrade the CPU, the XIO crossbar gets faster (the signalling is CPU clockspeed times 8, I believe) - that means if I go to a 400 MHz R12000 CPU, XIO throughput goes from 1.6 GBps to 3.2 GBps.

Re:Nothing new here

[Pulzar]

I think the original poster was referring to "PCI Express", but has incorrectly labeled it as PCI-X, which is a different standard.

PCI Express is what Intel has been pushing for a while and what will become the standard in mid-2004. It's also known as 3GIO.

Re:Nothing new here

[Pulzar]

The parent poster was incorrect when quoting the PCI Express bandwidth capabilities. The initial bandwidth will provide 2.5Gb/s in each direction (or 200MB/s when overhead is included). That's a single lane, i.e. 2 pins. Up to 32 lanes can be used to provide necessary bandwidth. So, if you'd like, you could set up a 32x2.5Gb/s connection, or 80Gb/s, in each direction. That's a little over 6GB/s.

As the silicon technology improves, the maximum speed of the lane will increase to 10Gb/s, for a total of 320Gb/s in the widest implementation, or about 25GB/s.

Now, that's a lot of bandwidth. :)

Re:Nothing new here

[Anonymous Coward]

Waste of money? AGP 8x is the sort of things that chipsets evolve into "for free" so to speak, just as my newer motherboard has USB 2, IEEE 1394, etc.

Oh, then again, you're a card carrying troll.

Re:Nothing new here

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, and you wonder why trolling is dying? You are just like tps12, you start sucking the mods cocks by craking jockes so you can get your pathetic karma back up.

why not have 256 MB video ram ?

[master_p]

I don't know much, i've heard that AGP(even x8) is not very fast, and it would be better to have more video ram (with cache, just like the Gamecube has).

Is this true ?

Re:why not have 256 MB video ram ?

[LoRdTAW]

In a way yes it is true. You can only shove so many textures into video memory until it fills up. One argument could be that extra textures can be cached in main
memory and then zipped to the video card when needed. The main thing is video card memory bandwidth. ATI's Radeon 9700 does something like almost 20
GBps. I remember a company called Bitboys that was working on embedding memory into the video processor silicon (as much as 24 MB) and using a 512 bit
wide bus running at core speed to provide 40+ GBps bandwidth. The chip also had an external memory bus to hold up to 256MB of additional video memory. Sony's PS2 uses a similar setup only using a 1024 bit bus and only 4 MB memory but it does over
50 GBps.

It would be cool to see a video chip that takes the 2D, video and AGP controller off the 3d chip and just have a 3d chip with 32 MB embedded ram and an external
memory controller. This would allow for more transistors to be used for rendering purposes. The AGP/2D chip acts as a frame buffer with its own memory to further
free up bandwidth inside the 3D chip. The two chips could then be linked together via a high speed low pin bus like Hyper Transport and possibly the 2D unit
could have 2 or 4 interfaces for adding more rendering units to double or quadruple rendering power. Of course this is a costly solution but the speed
gain would be incredible.

Re:why not have 256 MB video ram ?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not terribly correct. With the way that video cards, specifically 3D accellerators have evolved, the bus speed between the processor and video memory has become less important. Since all your textures are now loaded onto the card, all that's really going over the bus is instructions from the CPU telling the card what to do. Adding more video ram just allows you to store more higher resolution textures. So if you want to play games at 1600x1200 and have them look good, yeah, more ram. AGP 8x would likely see more benifit in desktop and other 2D apps where you actually blit stuff over the AGP bus.

What I'd like to see, as some others have already suggested, is a faster replacement for the PCI bus, which at over 8 years old, is really starting to show its age.

Hmm

[Maskirovka]

Is there anything preventing this new standard from being used for other peripherals like NICs and SCSI cards? If so, why not just phase out PCI completely?

Re:Hmm

[hamsterboy]

Yes: where PCI can have multiple devices on it, AGP can only have one. For technical details, see here.

-- Hamster

Re:Hmm

[benwb]

I don't see how this could be the case at least for agp 8x, as it has a bandwidth of 2.1 gigabytes/sec, and pci is about 133 megabytes/sec. A couple gigabit nics would have more than enough bandwidth hooked up to a couple agp ports...

Re:Hmm

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The bus is very one-sided. It gives 2.1GB/s to the card, but nothing particularly special on the way back. After all, the intent was to allow the cpu to stream from main memory.

Re:Hmm

[OverCode@work]

AGP is Accelerated Graphics Port, a very hackish specialization of the PCI bus for graphics devices. It is a master-to-target link, not a bus, per se. Its signalling rates are not be appropriate for a general-purpose bus (mobo manufacturers have enough trouble getting it right on the short runs to a single AGP port), and its optimizations are slanted toward squeezing performance out of bus traffic typical of graphics devices, not random access disk controllers and network devices.

Not to say that you *couldn't* have an AGP disk controller. But I doubt the performance improvement would be sufficient to justify the hassle and the lost AGP slot.

PCI-X is starting to come close to the lower AGP speeds in performance, and is a much cleaner and more general standard.

-John

Re:Hmm

[gordlea]

Quoting my computer architecture textbook:
"The current (PCI) standard allows the use of up to 64 data lines at 66MHz, for a raw transfer rate of 528MBytes/s, or 4.224 Gbps."

There should be enough bandwidth for a couple of 1000baseX nics...

Re:Hmm

[cdrudge]

Didn't read the article or even the summary did you... Towards the bottom of the second page, it states that multiple AGP 3.0 devices are supported.

Re:Hmm

[pqbon]

No... The intent was for the GPU to DMA from memory. The CPU should NEVER PIO to the card.

The point of putting smarts on the video card is that the CPU can stay hands off and do other things.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be nice, but I haven't seen 64bit/66Mhz PCI enabled motherboards outside of the dual processor server/workstation market. Even then, they only have approximately 2 slots, the rest being 32/33. Good luck again, finding a card that can use it.

Re:Hmm

[pqbon]

PCI-X v2 is coming out soon... PCI-X v1 makes out at 1.039 GB/s (theoretical) with 64bits wide at 133Mhz. PCI-X v2 is supposed to be 133 DDR with the option for QDR so you will get 4.164 GB/s(QDR).

Two of my desktops have PCI-X (not available in normal desktop boards only workstation boards) and it is great. PCI-X Gigabit networking and fiberchannel. Very fast.

AGP wouldn't be as good as PCI-X is. It may have the data rate but the protocol is designed for a graphics card. You could put other cards on it but PCI-X/PCI is a much better choice! (To note: PCI66/64 will give you 0.515GB/s which is a really high data rate for a desktop system to sustain.)

Re:Hmm

[benwb]

I've been stuck in the duldrums of 32bit/33mhz pci for so long that I've almost forgotten anything else existed. Having said that my comment still stands, because all of the announced boards that have agp 8x are 32bit/33mhz only.

Re:Hmm

[Sivar]

No.

AGP and PCI do not share bandwidth at all.

That is the whole point of AGP--to be a port in which the I/O of other devices would not effect the performance of the video I/O.
Additionally, if the AGP port shared bandwidth with anything, it wouldn't be a port, it would be a bus.

Re:Hmm

[CrazyMadPsychoBandit]

Several things...

1. AGP is unidirectional. The plugin card is always the bus master and the chipset is the slave. If the chipset wants to initiate a transaction, it has to do good ol' PCI.

2. No error correction/detection. AGP doesn't use parity/ECC because a flipped bit here and there in video data isn't that important. This could be very bad for more sensitive devices.

3. Only one device per bus. AGP is point-to-point.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

PCI Express is also comming soonish and that is what desktop PCs are going to use. You'll get 2Gbit/s (256MB/s) per wire pair and so far the spec has defined 1x, 4x, 8x, 16x connections. Connections are full duplex and point to point, so while 256MB may not sound like a huge improvement over 133MB (closer to 100MB really) of PCI, the agregate bandwith will much greater. Most devicec are going to use 1x connectors, but graphics adapters will be 16x (4GB/s). If workstations adopt PCI-Express I imagine they will come with at least a few 4x connectors (you can use 1x cards in 4x slots but nice vice versa).

Re:Hmm

[PhoenxHwk]

I think what you're looking for is PCI-Express. It's the next PCI and is really fast (in both directions). Interestingly enough, the PCI people are convinced that PCI-Express will be the next graphics port that will replace AGP 8x. This statement is given credibility by an nVIDIA press release that says they're starting to work with the PCI people.

A Quick Commentary

[clinko]

Granted, this is slightly off topic but worthy.

If multiple AGP is availiable for 8x then it's probably the greatest improvement possible. I ran 2 monitors at work, then got hooked. Now it's almost impossible for me to use 1 monitor. The problem is that you can't get multiple agps as of now so you have to use a crappy pci card.

This will also be awesome for gaming! I can't wait until I can get a dual agp card. I bet if they start making dual agp mobos then dual monitors will become very common.

The End.

Re:A Quick Commentary

[T3kno]

This is the card you're looking for. The thing that I'm wondering is if CRT's are completely on their way out as a display technology, of if we are going to start seeing CRT's with DVI inputs, from what I understand the bandwidth of the old D-SUB connector is just about fully utilized.

Re:A Quick Commentary

[jedie]

I can't wait until I can get a dual agp card. I bet if they start making dual agp mobos then dual monitors will become very common.

three things:
1) Dual head AGP cards already exist, Matrox even has a triple head AGP card.
2) What's wrong with PCI cards? If you use it for work (like you said in the first part of your comment), I don't see what's wrong with it. I'm using 1 AGP and 1 PCI right now and I'm happy the way it is. usually I use my main monitor, which has a higher resolution, for coding and at the same time my second screen is cluttered with IRC, IM and online-documentation
3) I don't think dual AGP slotted mobo's will become standard real soon: people have lots of PCI slots and that din't encourage people to go dual/triple/... screen. I rather think that dual AGP will remain something for techies, geeks and professionals.

And remember kids: the more monitos you have, the larger your penis is!

Re:A Quick Commentary

[spacefrog]

You can't get multiple AGP's, but there are several dual-head cards on the market.

Re:A Quick Commentary

[Anonymous Coward]

The End.

Of your nuts maybe

Well ok, perhaps not your nuts but who ever you point your monitor at will be sorry. Kinda funny way to get back at co-workers :)

Re:A Quick Commentary

[BrookHarty]

The Ati 9700 shows up as 2 video cards. (2 PCI cards), not sure but I think the BrookTree is the 3rd, TV out.

snip from the xfree.log

(--) PCI: (0:12:0) BrookTree unknown chipset (0x036e) rev 2, Mem @ 0xea002000/12
(--) PCI:*(1:0:0) ATI unknown chipset (0x4e44) rev 0, Mem @ 0xd8000000/27, 0xe9000000/16, I/O @ 0xc000/8
(--) PCI: (1:0:1) ATI unknown chipset (0x4e64) rev 0, Mem @ 0xe0000000/27, 0xe9010000/16

Re:A Quick Commentary

[iksowrak]

I rather think that dual AGP will remain something for techies, geeks and professionals.

FWIW, The Sept 2000 Maximum PC article on new mobo busses suggests that "PCI Epxress [the successor to the PCI we all love (or hate) and know] can handle graphics, and this might spell the end of AGP."

I wouldn't doubt that the days of AGP are soon coming to a close. But I'm no engineer, member of the PCI-SIG group nor owner of a crystal ball.

Re:A Quick Commentary

[G-funk]

I'm happily running dual-head at home from my geforce 4, and I know it's part of the geforce2 chipset as well (although most gf2s only have one monitor out plug)

Re:A Quick Commentary

[Anonymous Coward]

How did this get modded up? What "work" do you do that a crappy pci card can't handle? Old Matrox Milleniums can handle will run with another card, are fast enough for non-3d stuff (okay, maybe not DVDs if you dig up a Millenium I somewhere), are dirt cheap now, and have *fantastic* image quality. The last is the real kicker for me, as I upgraded to a much faster machine at work that had whatever stock card Dell is shipping now, and it's very noticeably harder on the eyes.

Confused

[El Pollo Loco]

It's been a long weekend, but this part still confuses me.

which includes support for multiple AGP ports with multiple AGP devices per port.

I can't figure out why this would be good. (this is not a troll, i just can't figure it out). Can you put two video cards in, and have them work together, like voodoo SLI type things? Or is it just one card for a monitor, another to output to tv?

Re:Confused

[ActiveSX]

You could use it to have 2 monitors, and have a huge desktop. Having two AGP cards is a serious advantage in this situation, as there won't be a PCI card to hold you back.

Re:Confused

[brunes69]

You have been able to have multiple video cards working torgether forever and a day now... every windows OS since Win98 supported it, and XFree has supported it since 4.0. Multiple monitors allows you to have an ultra wide desktop. It is one of those things that, onc eyou use it for a week, you can't live without. The problem is there is only one AGP port, so your secondary and tertiary, etc cards have to be PCI (that, or get a deual head AGP card, like I have).

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember the ATI RAGE MAXX cards?? They used to have 2 chips on each card. The original AGP versions got around this by having 1 AGP device and the other was a PCI device, even though it was on the AGP card. Hopefully this will lead to Radeon 9700 MAXX without anything sketchy. Imagine 2 9700 cores on the same card. Here's hoping. :)

Re:Confused

[Magila]

Personaly I would LOVE to see a return of SLI-like cofigs. Because of the highly parallel nature of rendering you could have one card render the top half of the screen and another do the bottom and get close to a 2x performance boost. This would be especialy usefull in this age of new graphics cards coming out every 9 months: buy a top-of-the-line card then pick up a second one on the cheap. Now instead of spending $400 every upgrade cycle you're spending $400+100 every other cycle.

Re:Confused

[jred]

Now instead of spending $400 every upgrade cycle you're spending $400+100 every other cycle.

Which is why you probably won't see it. The graphics companies are just like all other companies, they want as much of your money as they can get away with.

Re:Confused

[Magila]

I dunno, there's a lot of money to be made with this on the people who would go out and spend $800 on two top-of-the-line cards. Probably enough profit potential there to offset those upgrading by buying a second older card.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

i've actually glanced at the agp3.0 spec (admitidly it was not an in depth review), but i don't recall anything about multiple graphics chips (ie 3 or more devices, including the northbridge) sharing the bus. that would cut the effective bandwidth to each card in half, somewhat defeating the purpose. besides, at signalling rates that high (533mhz) having stubs to another slot that may or may not be occupied would totally screw up the already tight timing. so, i can't say for certain that this capability isn't in the spec (i'm curious enough to check when i get back to work), but i seriously doubt it.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. 9700's run HOT. Just don't go running to tech support when your computer is running out the back of your drooping case like a broken thermometer.

Then again, your heating bill would be pretty low this winter...

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is anyone here seriously going to buy these new cards anytime in the near future? Why not wait a little until the prices come down and the performance goes up?

Re:nigger lovers

[RazzleDazzle]

talk about evolution! im not so convinced of evolution anymore

Overkill?

[bogie]

Call me when we actually need more than AGP 2X. I've seen a lot of tests which show only the minor differences between AGP 2X and 4X. Its nice to know the bandwidth will be there, but this is one of those technologies like Serial ATA which really won't be showing its potential for a few years. Of course that won't stop the marketing gurus from tellig people AGP 8 is a "must have".

Interesting article

[Anonymous Coward]

However, it fails to include a mention of higher northbridge temperatures when running 1.5v cards with the 64mb aperture. I have always been inclined to enable the DDR compression for the AGP slot so that the motherboard won't signal a failure. The newer BIOS revisions in the i845 chipsets allow for this, but it is sadly lacking on this board.

What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devices

[nackrm]

Okay, it might be cool to have more than one AGP slot, but what I want to really know is what kind of aplications would make this useful? I'm kind of curious; could someone please come up with some creative ideas here?

SLI BACK AGAIN?

[LoRdTAW]

Remember VOODOO 2's SLI feature that we all so loved? Well it was AGP that
halted its implementation into more modern cards. Now with multiple AGP ports and
multiple devices per port, SLI may soon be back.

Re:SLI BACK AGAIN?

[scott1853]

Why would it come back?

It went away because performance got good enough in a single card that 2 cards weren't needed anymore.

Re:SLI BACK AGAIN?

[Magila]

Incorect, as far as GFX cards go there's always a need for more performance. The original poster is corect in saying it was AGP that killed SLI, it made it impractical.

Re:SLI BACK AGAIN?

[Derg]

um because 2 better cards equals approx. 4 of the lesser cards, if my math is reading your comment right. once new AGP card >= 2(Older PCI card), AGP becomes more popular. 2(SLI'd AGP Cards) >= 4(older PCI card) = hot Damn!

Or maybe Im wrong.. but who really cares about the facts, its the sound. "Dual AGP Cards" *note, dual as in 2 cards, one box, not dual display, because as noted there are many multihead cards already.* I know I'd prolly buy a mobo with > 1 agp slot, if it came with other things like a replacement for the aging pci standard (PCI-X et al) and SerialATA, not to mention usb2.0 and firewire on board..

damnit.. now I'm drooling over hardware that doesnt yet commercially exist..

Re:SLI BACK AGAIN?

[Kashif Shaikh]

Remember VOODOO 2's SLI feature that we all so loved?

Yeah, those were the days. But SLI only increased fill-rate, and not triangles/second. Granted, it was one of the best features around. By one card, get kick ass graphics and speed. Then by the second card, hook up in SLI, and boom you've effectively doubled your fillrate.

Re:SLI BACK AGAIN?

[k_187]

Actually, the Voodoo 4/5 cards used SLI on board. So it doesn't have to occur between two cards. The Voodoo 5 6000 even had it between 4 VSA-100s

Re:SLI BACK AGAIN?

[He Schutze He Scores]

True, the Voodoo5 was a good workaround of the AGP limitation of only 1 AGP device on the bus. It had to do the SLI thing internally and show only 1 device to the bus. IIRC, this is why they could not make the card take advantage of the AGP sideband addressing et al. AGP 8X, with (most importantly) the device limitation removed, could allow many VSA-100-ish devices to both cooperate as a rendering chip farm and use advanced AGP functions.

load times

[Twillerror]

Load times are never reported in performance tests. Most games are running at over 30 fps on a gforce 3 or better, so who really cares about frame rates.

But...NOLF 2 takes about a minute to load on my box. Of course my machine isn't the fastest in the world, but I'm left wondering if all those textures loading onto the board are part of the slowdown.

Re:load times

[hamsterboy]

I don't think this is the problem. Let's do a quick calculation.

Say your card has 128MB of memory. With AGP 1x, the peak transfer rate is 266 MB/s. Even if you figure on getting only half of that, you can fill up the card's memory in one second.

In reality, the video card lives its life frame by frame. The real framerate hit comes when the texture load in a scene exceeds the card's memory, and it has to fetch from system memory to render each frame. This takes on the order of 10ms per transfer plus the actual transfer, or right around one (1) geological age, while the GPU twiddles its thumbs.

-- Hamster

Re:load times

[Anonymous Coward]

By default NOLF2 pre-caches everything before map load. This means longer load times, but once u are in the game there are no points where yer card has to stop to wait for main memory to send the texture for that house or whatever. On a side note, Jedi Knight 2 takes about twice as long to load as NOLF2 for me. I'm still on 800mhz with 384ram though :)

Re:load times

[buck_wild]

Assuming you're using one of today's video cards, I'd assume that the bottleneck is more likely with your slower CPU, 5400rpm IDE hard drive on an ISA controller card, your 90NS simms, your 1x cd rom drive, your 16meg ram, or maybe you just haven't defragged in a while...

The point is, there are a LOT of bottlenecks in a machine, and adding in one faster (pick one of the above) item is not going to solve the problem.

Re:load times

[ginxd]

id say most of that is BOLLOCKS. At which part does drawning to the screen require ur HD? or ur CDROM? as was rightly said before, it is all down to the performance of ur GPU and the MEMORY it has any ur MOTHERBOARD has (incase the GPU memory isn't enuf). the CPU does have some impact, but no where near as much as the GPU. for example, I can run most games on my AMD 800 with my gforce 4mx as well as i can on my AMD 1400 with my gforce 3 ti200. and as far as defragging goes, that makes EVEN less difference.

Re:load times

[buck_wild]

The data you're loading has to come from somewhere, right? Perhaps the hard drive? Maybe the CDrom, or even system ram? If said medium is slow, that could lend itself to the problem.

Unless I misread your post and you're actually talking about screen-paint times... But you would have said frames-per-second, not load times.

What I want to see is...

[trevinofunk]

32X! Go sega!!! Then i can play all 4 games i bought for it.

Re:What I want to see is...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean all 4 games made for it?

Re:What I want to see is...

[Anonymous Coward]

When did they come out with a fourth?! And I thought my collection was complete...

Benifits vs cost

[bl968]

It's simple if the AGP-8x offers a clear benefit for the costs to the users such as an increase in the quality of the graphics or the screen's refresh rate, or new graphic features then they will embrace it. If it doesn't it will whither on the vine. People expect things to be much better then the items they are replacing when they buy new. I know I do.

Re:Benifits vs cost

[bl968]

That's what I get for posting too fast. Benefits vs costs should be the title of my post.

Re:Moderators, Moderators...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Multiple ports & devices

[Karamchand]

As far as I know AGP has a higher bandwidth than e.g. PCI. So will there be AGP network interface cards since there can be multiple AGP ports?
Thank you for any insight.

Re:Multiple ports & devices

[k_187]

I don't see why there is a need for them. Gigabit ethernet does a theoritical max of 125 MB/s, I think PCI 2.1's max is 133, I think. And we all know that these things don't always operate at their maxes.

Re:Multiple ports & devices

[Karamchand]

Thank you for your answer. Admittedly, yes, network adapters are a bad example (for now;) - but perhaps some RAID controllers could need higher bandwidth.

On the other hand, yea, probably PCI is enough - moreover PCI isn't a static non-evolving standard either.

Thank you again!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

AGP isn't the barrier in this case, IIRC

[Murdock037]

If I remember the press release correctly from a few weeks back, nVidia introduced AGP 8X in some of their cards-- but inexplicably not in their top-of-the-line.

As such, if you get AGP 8x running up to speed, isn't it possible you're testing the limitations of the cards that are available now, and not of the bus? I would think you'd want to flood the bus with data, and then see how it holds up.

See the press release. The GeForce4 Ti4600 is current king of the family, and it's nowhere to be found.

Somebody reply if I'm off in my thinking here.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[PacoTaco]

Debugging full-screen 3D games. Right now I use a Matrox dualhead card, but it would be nice to have two independent adapters.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[4444444]

I have a G4 with 3 20 inch monitors I use one for email one for the web and what ever else im doing at the moment and the other fot itunes and any other windows I don't want in my way but since i upgraded to jaguar I can only use my main card (AGP) the other pci cards prevent the system from booting ( I haven't tried everything yet to fix it) but once you get used to multiple monitors it really sucks to be stuck with one

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[ngoy]

In gaming, you could use multiple POV's in flight simulators (I think M$ flight sim supports three monitors, IIRC), or racing (Front, left, right). In desktop publishing it is usful for seeing two pages at once, or four pages at once depending on what resolution you are using.

At work I leave Outlook open on one all the time, have Visual Studio open on that one and an Internet Exploder screen open on the right screen. That way when I make changes in VS on the left I can instantly refresh the IE window on the right without doing all the toggling back crap.

I also used to do reports and presentations. Having dual monitors allowed me to have Excel/Access/whatever source program open on the left, and Powerpoint on the right. I could drag a chart from Excel full size and drop it into Powerpoint without having to do cut/alt-tab switch window/paste. Much easier, gives WYSIWIG some credence to its name.

I am running dual monitors on an NT4 box with 2 Matrox Millenium PCI's (have had dual monitors for 4 or five years now I think on that one). My other box has a Matrox G450 AGP and a Matrox PCI Millenium for dual capability on it (W2K).

IMHO, Matrox makes the best multi-display drivers/cards at a reasonable price and have had them for quite a long time compared to the others. They have a quad output card also but it is costs a bit more than the duals.

ngoy

What?

[MagPulse]

All the GeForce 4 Ti4x00 cards I've seen can drive two monitors at once with nview, as long as you have a DVI-analog converter for the second monitor. I'm not sure if you can go analog->DVI for two digital monitors.

I just checked, and the Radeon 8500 and 9700 both do the same thing.

Re:What?

[scotch]

I have a 4200 and was wondering about hooking up the 2nd monitor - any idea where I can the converter you talk about? Is it a generic product or an nvidia thing?

Re:What?

[Greebz]

I got the converter in the box with my card.

AGP 4x on Radeon

[Mnemia]

It'd be nice if the drivers for my laptop's Radeon would allow me to set XFree86 at even AGP 4X without massive instability - I still get hard lockups if I run it for more than 30 seconds at higher than 2X mode.

Re:AGP 4x on Radeon

[Anonymous Coward]

Then 8x will only run for 15 seconds before crashing :) Seriously though I have an asus mobo and an original radeon and it doesnt like to run in 2x even, it sticks with 1x.

One Answer, But An Important One

[Microsoft Research]

I can definitively say that Microsoft's DirectX researchers are already working on utilizing AGP 8X with the alpha versions of the game library DirectX that is currently being developed.

Although most PC users are only utilizing 2X or 4X at the present time, we fully expect at least half of the gaming population to buy new machines and video cards that support this new milestone in AGP by Christmas of 2004 or so, if not (much) earlier depending on how development carries on.

Re:One Answer, But An Important One

[Anonymous Coward]

we fully expect at least half of the gaming population to buy new machines and video cards that support this new milestone in AGP by Christmas of 2004 or so

Gee, are you really sure that PC gamers will upgrade their hardware platform within the next two years? That's really going out on a limb!

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there anything preventing this new standard from being used for other peripherals like NICs and SCSI cards? If so, why not just phase out PCI completely?

When it comes to Drive and Network access, do you really think the bus is the bottleneck?

Re:Why?

[Maskirovka]

in the case of myrinet and fibre channel, yes.

Integrated Video Cards

[seangw]

With more than one AGP bus, those motherboards that are so cheap with a built in AGP Video Card, can now actually allow for AGP upgrade.

Stop thinking graphics

[smugskii]

My wishlist (primarily as a server tech guy) does not concern squeezing a bit more graphics out of the bus.
Personally, I would like to see that bandwidth used for other accellerators, such as SSL accelleration like nCipher provide. Or how about a Java non-virtual machine? I'm sure many games could benefit from a dedicated AI board, possibly using FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) so that some especially tricky AI functions could be off loaded from the CPU. To put it short, we already have stunning graphics, which will continue to evolve no matter what you think about the tweaks to AGP. What I hope the more imaginative of you are thinking, is what else could be done with this?

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[Junta]

Why the hell would you need that sort of bandwidth for a SSL accelerator? Even if you were using it for Hard Disk I/O, Hard Disk I/O goes throuh the PCI bus, so it would not be saturated. For the most reasonable area of network usage, bandwidth on any PC equipment wouldn't go anywhere near such a need. For bigger needs, you probably need bigger equipment anyway. Don't think a dedicated Java processor would be a big seller, especially with the speedups in implementations seen as of late. AI hardware may sound intriguing, but it is so unsexy in terms of consumer visiblity. That, and methods to AI frequently change.

No, the place where the bandwidth has the most impact on the user experience remains the graphics. They look pretty nice nowadays, but until you see scenes generated on the fly at 60 fps or more that are indistinguishable from real life, graphics will always be lacking.

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[AvitarX]

The barrier to ultra hyper realistic on the fly graphics at 60 fps will never be the graphics (IMHO). It will be the movement. Wasn't there an article here once about how cloth will be nearly impossible to realistically render?

How about the way people move? Graphics card will be able to on the fly render something that looks true to life frame by frame, long before the PC will be able to feed the correct movements too match.

The limit of our ability to model movement is painfully obvious in the final fantasy movie. many stils were true to life in newspaper quality color depth and resolution, but most of the scenes were awkward. When the graphics get too good is when these movements become more annoying, think Toy Story vs Final fantasy. Or even the semi realistic princess in Shrek, it was just horribly awkward, but with less graphics, or very unreal (such as Shreck himself, or any of Monsters, inc) the movement does not stand out as much.

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[Osty]

Absolutely right, stop thinking graphics. I think you're off in left field, though. Think of this instead -- a video-input card on a bus with enough bandwidth to handle an uncompressed HD video stream (like what you get out of a DirecTV STB, or a cable STB in the few places that get HD over cable). The advent of dual-AGP motherboards and such a video-input card would suddenly make non-OTA HD signals available to PVR applications (not everybody has OTA HD signals broadcast in their area, or an antenna on which to receive them). Right now, the PCI bus simply does not have the bandwidth to transfer uncompressed HD video. (Right, the "proper" solution would be to bypass the HD decoding in the STB, sending the mpeg2 stream directly to the computer and then decoding it there, but I've yet to see an STB that will do that.)

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that has much to do with the quality of the images. All the CG movies so far have been somewhat experimental - modelling and animation packages have come a long way really quickly but they're still improving. The artists using them still may be on a bit of a learning curve, figuring out the tricks on how to get everything just right. In the case of Final Fantasy, I've heard that the movement of the characters was simply limited by the techniques used to model them (all sub-d's, if I'm not mistaken..).

You are right though that movement is a big issue, and the graphics aren't the bottleneck. The thing that's going to help with that the most is raw CPU power to do accurate physics on the fly. This is especially the case with cloth.. and water.. anything fluid. At the same time, I think the quality of graphics needs to keep improving to keep up with CPU power, even though it looks like number crunching is lagging behind rendering power right now.

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[csp]

64 bit PCI can handle uncompressed HD video just fine, without needing AGP (remember uncompressed HD is "only" 1.5 gigabits per second). Take a look at the HDstationOEM card from DVS, which we've been using to do streaming uncompressed HDTV on Internet2.

Now, if only it didn't cost $15000 for the card... :(

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[pqbon]

So if you are a server guy get in the server world. PCI-X, PCI-Express, PCI V.3, HyperTransport, or Infiniband. AGP is for desktops to do graphics (or workstations). AGP is NOT for servers. Most server chipsets don't have AGP (see serverworks Champion and Grand Champion chipsets (yes they do have workstation versions that include AGP) or the Intel E7500). People are working on SSL accelleration on PCI/PCI-X cards. They are also working on iSCSI and such. If you interested in the server world look there... Desktop PCs ARE NOT SERVERS. AGP is for the comodity PC market video (and yes, workstations...)

If you really want performance build an intelegent IO device on infiniband and farm you SSL work there or your java work... You can already buy some wide fast infiniband cards for PCI-X mellenox ?sp? and Intel make very nice ones...

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[Osty]

True enough, but I think AGP 8x would have a quicker consumer adoption rate than PCI64 (considering that 64-bit PCI has been around for quite a while and still isn't showing up too frequently in consumer-grade motherboards or cards), and would also have enough bandwidth for streaming uncompressed HD signals. That means that we'll be more likely to see an AGP 8x consumer-grade (< $1000) HD card before we'll see a PCI64 consumer-grade HD card.

Then again, the odds are in favor of the industry thinking that AGP is only for graphics, and so you won't see any AGP cards other than graphics cards, and second AGP slots on motherboards will only ever be used for multi-monitor displays.

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[ciscoeng]

SSL with hardware acceleration takes an enormous hit on the PCI bandwidth. There's a ton of encryption traffic that must pass during just one connection.

Get a dual head Geforce

[brunes69]

They aren't hard to find. I got this Geforce4 MX 460 two weeks ago.... it has dual SVGA out, and COmposite and Svidoe out, AND composite and svideo in. Only 130 dollars, and it runs Ut2k3 like a charm :)

Re:Get a dual head Geforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry guy, MX boards are crippled. Should have gone for a 4200, even a GeForce3 Ti200 beats it in most applications.

Re:Get a dual head Geforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Except dual head applications, where the GF3's suck ass. (That is the thread, right?)

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[moonbender]

Multi-monitoring is already routinely used in a whole slew of applications - publishing, image processing, CAD/CAM to name a few ...
Most of these don't require the added bandwidth of the AGP, though, but then again, few things do - CAD/CAM might, and games, of course. Which leads to another possible use for multiple AGPs.
However, even though multi-device gaming has been possible for a long time and has even been pimped by the graphics chipset industry recently, it never really took off.

Multiple AGPs....

[Steveftoth]

Ok, first off AGP is an Accelerated Graphics Port. Notice that it is a PORT not a Bus. This means that in order to have more then one AGP Port, you would have to have more then one PCI bus. Since all the implementations of AGP share with the PCI control functions. It would be very difficult to just simply add more then one AGP port to the PC system, little things like the operating system would need to be updated, it's not like a simple bios tweak can handle it. There are already many problems with the current agp system. I'm sure some ofyou remember the whole fiasco with AMD and the AGP GART system tweak that was causing Linux to crash, but not Windows because AMD told MS to shut it off.
Anyway, I too would like multiple AGPs on my motherboard, but it would take more then a smart vendor to make it a reality. Intel designed the AGP as a stopgap, temporary solution for the lowest common denominator. And it still works well if you only need one monitor.

Re:Multiple AGPs....

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, it is a bus. there are 32 signal lines for both addresses and data, and the graphics chip and the northbridge both send data to each other... so, when one is sending, the other has to tristate. hence, it's a bus...

Re:Multiple AGPs....

[buck_wild]

Hm. I always had thought that the AGP bus and the PCI bus were completely seperate, so as to not interfere with one another.

Re:Multiple AGPs....

[Steveftoth]

Actually the AGP is a side band, which means that it has a seperate line for the data transfer. But it still shares some signals over the PCI.

Re:Multiple AGPs....

[buck_wild]

Interesting. Thanks for the info.

Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[swordgeek]

Please forgive my ignorance. This is an honest question.

At the time that AGP first came out, I was under the impression that its primary advantage was to allow a direct pipeline to system memory, if you ran out of on-board RAM.

Then RAM got really REALLY cheap, and we went from 4-8MB onboard to 32MB, almost overnight. Now you can get video cards with 64MB and even 128MB.

I can't imagine games using more than 128MB of texture RAM, and so I have to wonder why AGP is still being developed. What else does it offer?

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to wonder why AGP is still being developed. What else does it offer?

A faster bus. Except for this hunk of junk which gloms onto the slow PCI bus.

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[shamilton]

Games may not use 128MB of texture memory (or they may), but video memory is used by other stuff too.

There are colour, depth, stencil, alpha buffers (probably others.) Another big thing is vertex information. A static model can be loaded into video memory. Newer cards support programs (shaders) which are executed on the GPU. All this could add up.

RAM is cheap enough that adding more has a minimal effect on price, but could be useful for various things (even down the road.)

I vaguely recall some hack which let you use your video memory as a swap device. That's nice for a system which is only used as a gaming machine part of the time.

sh

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[Teddyman]

I can't imagine games using more than 128MB of texture RAM

Unreal Tournament 2003 has a textures directory of about 1,4 GB, and it's using relatively few stacked textures. Doom 3 might well use a dozen textures on one surface, so 128MB might not last that long into the future. Fortunately, texture compression helps a lot.

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[j3110]

Actually, I think it shows very well that AGP is not a great thing at all. If you look at FPS of random cards and compare it to the memory bandwidth of the card(not AGP bandwidth), you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have: memory bandwidth is more important than the GPU. The major improvements in the GPU have been in conserving memory bandwidth, or width of the bus to the memory. The Geforce4TI4600 offers a 10.4GB/s bandwidth. AGP 8x is a mere 2.1GB/s. With this in mind, any time you access main memory, it is going to be 1/5th the speed of the on board memory, meaning 1/5th the performance without speculative reading or cacheing. If your working set of textures is greater than the ammount of memory on your board, you will suffer severe performance hits even at 8x. 166Mhz DDR 8byte wide memory (333 dimms) are 2.6GB/s theoretical. System memory is not fit decent graphics anyhow.

The reason why AGP will never amount to much more than a seperate bus(so it doesn't choke PCI) is that graphics vendors like NVidia and ATI will always put higher performance ram on the video card than are in the main system. Even if we had AGP32X that had a bandwidth of 10GB/s, there will be 50GB/s memory on the card, and memory too slow to even keep up with AGP on the motherboard. In the end, it may allow a developer to use a variety of textures provided that there aren't more than XMB of them in use at any given point in time. This is because you can fill the local memory with textures in less than a second. A small glitch in video that doesn't occur often isn't going to annoy most gamers if the graphics are nice.

Video memory just needs to be different. Video memory got cheaper with normal memory, but it's not :) There are lots of reasons to want to do more than 128M of textures, but there are none to use system memory for video :)

The video bandwidth to the monitor at 1280x1024x32bitx85hz(refresh) would be 6GB/s at that resolution,bit depth, and FPS(refresh). Most video cards would stretch to make that. Calculate that into the memory bandwidth of the next video card you get before you check out the FPS. See how accurate it is :)

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[buck_wild]

Nah. They both have to work in conjunction. If I have memory at 500mhz, but a slow GPU, the card will still suck.

Fast ram makes a good card, but fast ram and fast GPU make a great card.

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[jkfresh]

You can get 256 megs on Matrox Parhelia. ... This makes me wonder.. Why can't onboard video memory be upgraded? Some of the early ATi boards and a Matrox board I own could be upgraded..

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAM that's soldered on is cheaper and it's easier to get higher speeds. For some reason (I'm not an EE) the interconnects on removable RAM slow things down.

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[Greebz]

"I can't imagine games using more than 128MB of texture RAM, and so I have to wonder why AGP is still being developed. "

Unreal Tournament 2003 has an "ultra high" setting (that is disabled in current builds -- possibly via an ini though) that uses approx 180meg of textures -- that's the reason it's disabled, none of the current mainstream cards can cope -- yet.

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[tortap-0]

Yes exactly, and 640k should be enough for anyone.

Re:Does AGP offer *any* advantage?

[swordgeek]

There are some technical issues, but it's mostly planned obsolescence. Companies would rather you bought a whole new video card every two years.

Genericity

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the more crap you stuff onto the mobo, the more crap you have on the mobo. The whole point of a PC is having a clean slate to implement whatever you want.

Multihead

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

Do you know how hard it is getting these days to find a decently modern PCI card for use in a multihead system? It's still possible to get fairly acceptable 2d cards for raw display, but anything 3d and you're generally screwed. This is why I'm looking forward to multiple AGP slots, not because of other devices that may make use of the slot (just look at the failure of VESA Local bus for that mistake), but for added video capabilities without having to resort to a lack-luster multihead card, an expensive as all hell multihead card *cough*MatroxParhelia*cough*, or a lackluster PCI card. I will be able to buy about $200 worth of video cards to get decent multihead performance. This, above all else, is what looks to be really cool...

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I did a similar thing with 2 computers and msvcmon. It only works for visual studio, but if that's what you want, then you can basically debug 3d games without worrying about focus issues or trying to catch transient visual problems. If you use something else, there may well be a similar tool that does the same thing.

Standards change too fast imho

[jedie]

Is there anything preventing this new standard from being used for other peripherals like NICs and SCSI cards? If so, why not just phase out PCI completely?

Is it just me, or are people nowadays just throwing around with standards? I mean come on, if I were to buy a new PC today, I wouldn't be able to use my old SB16 ISA with it, if I wanted to. Imagine if they would stop with PCI too..
I'm all for evolution, but not for changing standards every two years, rendering perfectly functional (maybe a bit "older" and "slower") hardware (and even software) useless.

Quite offtopic: a couple of weeks ago I tried to play "Simon the sorcerer 2" and I couldn't get it to work! hooray for MS?

Re:Standards change too fast imho

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just you. The rest of us pitched our SB16s years ago.

The last evolution was just right: ISA, then PCI, then AGP, then fewer ISA, then one ISA, then no ISA. Dear industry: do it just like that again.

Was I trolled? I can't tell.

Re:Standards change too fast imho

[Proc6]

Every couple years?

The first I remember seeing PCI was in a Pentium 60. That's been, what, 7-8 years ago off the top of my head? AGP's been at least 4. No offense but I dont think the computer industry should hold up for your ISA sound card. ISA seriously sucks, you might just have to break down and buy a new $9 PCI sound card.

Re:Standards change too fast imho

[Feyr]

sorry to break your bubble, i have a few 486s SX 25 here with PCI slots

Re:Standards change too fast imho

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite motherboard a couple years ago had 2 VLB slots, 2 ISA slots and 3 PCI slots. Running a 486DX2/66, and with 8 megs of ram. That thing lasted me forever. I ended up swapping out the ATI Mach32 2 Meg card for a PCI Nvidia TNT card, and it played Quake2 reasonably well. Of course, I ended up pitching it after a few years, but for it's time, it was an amazing motherboard.

Of course, 64MB is quite a lot of video memory.

[91degrees]

Most software is designed for equipment with considerably less video mem. In some cases, you could probably get the data across fast enough using PCI.

Even if a scene does have a lot of textures, clever memory management in the application can make sure that polygons using the same texture occur sequentially, meaning the load on the AGP bus is still quite small, only having to deal with new textures. Even if clever memory management is not used, a scene containing every texture in memory at every LOD will not happen in any real world situation.

Re:Of course, 64MB is quite a lot of video memory.

[DJ-Dodger]

And yet already 128MB of RAM is giving quite a performance boost in some games! Sure you can run them with lower quality settings, but if you've got a top of the line graphics card, do yourself a favor and go with the 128MB version. It's not just fluff. See this other fine Tech-Report article.

HE USES MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO

[Anonymous Coward]

You ought to be modded down just on principle.

But what's wrong with debugging with Emacs and just switching shells between the 3d game being debugged and Emacs?

Re:HE USES MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO

[Anonymous Coward]

Because not everyone is an ass muching RMS whore like you. Some of us actually use Windows for our products, because that's where the market is. There is no point in trying to sell to the Linux/BSD crowd, as they don't want to pay for software, and there just aren't enough of them to make it worthwhile. Windows on the otherhand, has an enormous market, and most of the users are more than willing to pay $50US for software.

shouldn't be called AGP anymore then

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't the definition of graphics port that there is only one of them, that's why it's not a graphics bus?

I read that somewhere.

Re:shouldn't be called AGP anymore then

[Anonymous Coward]

A bus can handle about 100 people or thereabouts. A port can handle thousands of people at any given time.

You tell me which one is bigger.

Re:shouldn't be called AGP anymore then

[cetialpha]

So what are you saying? Get rid of the bus? Make people walk, how fast will you render that image now?

Re:shouldn't be called AGP anymore then

[Anonymous Coward]

Bigger is not always more efficient.

Take a look at California's ports right now, for example...

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[DeComposer]

I'm currently using a six-monitor configuration for music production. I have Sonar spread over four 19" monitors and I use two 17" monitors to display virtual intruments/effects and the MOTU console.

3D isn't a factor on this machine, but it's tricky to get three (one AGP, two PCI) dual-head displays to work side by side correctly.

Two AGP slots would permit me to use just two Parhelia (or competitors'--once they jump on the triple-head bandwagon) cards and free up PCI slots for more useful things like DSP cards.

Then, too, a configuration like that would make for a breathtaking multi-monitor gaming experience!

No incentive

[Anonymous Coward]

I see no reason for an AGP-based system.

The AGP's bandwidth is used mostly for uploading texture data. What else can the GPU not do besides quickly uploading texture data through the AGP interface? Well, some applications desire the use of Virtual Graphics Texture RAM, but that's too much of a hack and we should realy be interested in the advantage of a unified graphics/system RAM that may allow the GPU to allocate space upon demand. We are entering into an era of high-performance RAM and we are all left holding our dicks on whether we can actualy use multiple AGP ports on our motherboards? I don't find this a necessity. Re-design the PC, I don't like being stuck in the ATX form factor pushing a mere 6 PCI slots on me. I want more hardware expansion on my future computer, but cannot. I have invested in a 164UX Alpha 633MHz computer and it is solid as a whore's heart. I have also invested in another API Networks platform, the API Dual 833MHz Alpha CS20 Rackmount, and it came stock with only 2 64bit PCI slots. I coupled, with my CS20, a Rackmount MAGMA PCI bridge and now have 1 Ultra160 Adaptec SCSI RAID (60GB mirrored storage) localy on the CS20, and the MAGMA chassis has all my favorite SIIG, 3Dfx, ATI, 3DLabs, RME, Linksys, and DEC hardware. I have benchmarked until the cows came home and I have seen only 5% to 15% advantage in using AGP videocards over their PCI equivalents and only in the transfer of Texture. AGP is a verry sad happening in computer graphics portability. Manufacturers were tied into splitting production based on AGP and PCI, mass ammounts of advanced graphics clusters were being shadowed because of availability of certain hardware; yes, I have used homogenous GPU's to compute and render 3d images using the Chromium project. The Alpha architecture *should* not end with the 21364; it should be payed more attention now that it is a more house-hold name just from its broadcasted death. So, where will ATI and nVidia take us today...fucking USB videocards? Eat my ASssssP.

Sincerily,

The Alpha Troll (commonly seen posts on linuxgames.com)

Re:No incentive

[Anonymous Coward]

"we should realy be interested in the advantage of a unified graphics/system RAM that may allow the GPU to allocate space upon demand"

The fastest memory on an add-in board today is, I believe, around 20GB/s. The fastest system memory is, I believe, around 3GB/s with a single channel or 6GB/s dual-channel.

Oh, and just to make life more fun, remember that merely displaying the video is probably using close to 1GB/second of memory bandwidth at reasonable resolutions. So now on a 3GB/s system you're sharing just over 2GB/s between your CPU and graphics chip... and the CPU was probably starved for data quite often even with the full 3GB/s.

See the problem? Why would you want to make your 3D chip share even a 6GB/s bandwidth with the CPU when it could be getting 20GB/s from its own memory? It's a great way to save money on cheap PCs with integrated 3D, but a lousy way to improve performance.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[scot4875]

I've done this as well, and it does work. It's still much more convenient to be able to develop and debug on the same machine, though.

Two AGP slots would be nice ... But I don't know if I really want two high-powered 3d accelerators in one machine. That would put out quite a bit of heat.

--Jeremy

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[dgmartin98]

I have a ATI All-in-Wonder (AIW) 128 Pro, so it has the TV tuner built-in. I'd like to upgrade to a Radeon AND keep the TV tuner. But the Radeon AIW costs a lot more than the Radeon non-AIW. Therefore, I would ideally like to have:

1. my current AIW 128 Pro, just to use the TV-tuner.
2. a Radeon 8500, without the TV tuner.

But unfortunately, my system doesn't allow two AGP cards.

Dave

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I use one for email

Exactly how much email do you get that you need to dedicate a 20 inch monitor to it? Are you a spammer? :)

Fucking Macintosh Bukakke Slurpers

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: When will we see an 8X AGP card in a fucking Fag-intosh computer?

A: When they've dropped in price about 85% because something better has come along; and when Steve "I only stole *BSD twice" Jobs can figure out a way to make the Macintosh "do me next, Steve, please!" lemmings think they're hip and stylish for buying one on an overpriced Fag-intosh.

Hey, Taco and Hemos: FUCK YOU for buying a TiBook. Of course, with all your really valuable VA Software stock, I'm sure you bought the top-of-the-line models. It's only the pathetic college students who READ your fucking website who fall for the Steve Jobs reality distortion field and buy the iBook with the G3... which don't quite run as fast, does it? Not NEARLY as fast... But of course, since you're a Steve Jobs butt-buddy, you can't get your money back after you find this little fact out: Mac OS X only runs ACCEPTABLY on a G4, not a G3!

Yahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Fart!

Re:Fucking Macintosh Bukakke Slurpers

[Anonymous Coward]

Penis envy.

Why you sometimes can't "just switch shells"

[yerricde]

But what's wrong with debugging with Emacs and just switching shells between the 3d game being debugged and Emacs?

In some environments (such as Microsoft Windows), a shell switch between the GDI windowed environment and a fullscreen environment forces the video card to clear its memory entirely. This can mask the very problem you're trying to isolate in the debugger.

Nvidia X drivers support 16 displays

[t0qer]

Somewhere on nvnews.net (the official, unofficial support site for nvidia X drivers) I read that the X drivers support 16 cards running at once.

I can think of several applications for this, starting with the 3dfx approach to boosting 3d performance by having each card take turns drawing a scanline (sli)

There is also a possibility 3D displays on the horizon will require more information to draw the screen (Twice as much because the scene has to be drawn once for each eye)

Another possibility is for game house use. Standard counterstrike gamehouses charge about $3@hr to rent a machine to play CS. If a player could rent a machine with a wider FOV from multiple monitors the operator could charge more to cover the costs of the extra graphics cards. I would gladly pay $20@hr to be able to play doom3 in a psuedo holodeck enviroment.

Well thats my 2cents into the fray.

So is it any better to have faster AGP?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Well, a bit, sometimes; but mostly no. First you have to realise that modern graphics cards have a tonne of on-board memory. The on-board memory is used to store the current view, another view that the card is rendering (which is switched to only when complete to avoid flicker) and the distance that each pixel is from the user (the z-buffer). It also stores flattened out texture maps that the graphics card rotates into place on the rendering buffer.

The texture maps usually take up the most memory, and they can change depending on the position of the player and even which direction he is looking in.

The position of the objects is sent every frame but shows less variability.

But the texture maps need to be transfered into the graphics card memory once before they can be rendered.

So this happens initially when the texture first appears, but after that its in the memory and it doesn't need resending after that until it is flushed if it is no longer in view and something else needs the space.

But just occasionally new textures are needed. For example sometimes in say, half-life I used to spin around and the screen would stop updating for maybe 1/8 of a second. What was happening was that the wrong textures were in the graphics card and they were being pushed down the AGP-1 pipe as fast as it could take it- not really fast enough- I'd often get a rocket launcher up me; the screen would have stopped updating for just a moment.

Of course now the graphics cards have more memory, the software may be written better so that textures get preloaded before they are needed, and probably most or all of a levels textures fits into the card buffer anyway. So all in all- little or no waiting when spinning around; and the AGP is now x4 as well so instead of 1/8 second we are looking at 1/32 worst case; only 32 milliseconds, which for a one-off jitter isn't perceptible.

John Carmack has talked about the idea of generating texture maps dynamically. If he were to implement this, then AGP would be much more important. Right now, precalculated, fixed texture maps are much more common in games. Bottom line- who cares about agp x8; it's like ata133 it makes no difference to nearly everyone.

Re:So is it any better to have faster AGP?

[CreamsicleSeventeen]

John Carmack has talked about the idea of generating texture maps dynamically.

Why bother? I would think that texture maps play a role similar to precompiled bsp trees.

Re:So is it any better to have faster AGP?

[SmittyTheBold]

John Carmack has talked about the idea of generating texture maps dynamically.

I'm not sure if any of the Quake games so far (or maybe Doom 3) have used it, but the original Unreal had dynamic/procedural textures all over the place. Fire, fountains, and pseudo-particle effects were all handled by dynamic textures. Some of them were even fractals, IIRC...

Unreal worked fine on computers that more often than not did not have AGP, but then the areas with dynamic textures were small portions of the screen and rarely (if ever) larger than about 256x256 or so.

Re:So is it any better to have faster AGP?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

You can reduce the vertex list by pre-rendering a shape that is in front of another shape, and only updating it at a much slower rate; provided you don't overdo it, it can give much better frame rate; up to 20x in some cases (e.g. flight simulators).

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[PhoenixFlare]

I'm not trying to flame you, but...

An ENTIRE 20 inch monitor just for email, and another one for just a web browser?

I won't claim to know what you're actually doing, but that sounds really wasteful....

*sputter*

[Anonymous Coward]

In some environments (such as Microsoft Windows), a ...

You keep using those words!

Re:*sputter*

[Anonymous Coward]

That just really rung my funny bell! I'm not a unix bigot, but that was f-ing funny!

Large Fonts

[yerricde]

Exactly how much email do you get that you need to dedicate a 20 inch monitor to it? Are you a spammer?

Exactly how do you jump from "uses a physically large display" to "sends an excessive amount of electronic mail"? For all we know, 4444444 could have vision problems and be running a 20-inch display either at a pixel count that most of us would associate with a 14-inch display or with the Mac equivalent of Windows's "Large Fonts".

The same things were said...

[Anonymous Coward]

...back when AGP first came out. A consultant friend bought one of the first AGP mobo/video combos he could get and said that nothing he had ran any faster on the new-fangled AGP video card than it did on a decent PCI card. The reason is simple: Nobody was taking advantage of AGP at the time. Now they do and nobody would question whether AGP cards are better than PCI. Some day, game makers will take advantage of 8x AGP.

future apps to use the extra bw? 2 words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom Three

AGP 8x will probably move it from screenshot mode to slideshow mode on my system!

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Steveftoth]

Maybe he's almost blind from all the radiation comming off of the 3 20 inch monitors he's got on the desk?

Or maybe he's just an american, probably drives an SUV too. ;)

AGP 8x boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[ndogg]

If you had the right kind of glasses, you could have real 3d perspectives in any application you choose. The two eye pieces would display a scene with the camera in two different positions, with each card rendering the scene from the two different cameras.

In more practical terms, it makes a lot of things easier. I can, in a GUI environment, have Emacs or VIM running on the two different monitors, and if I have each session of the respective editor displaying two different files, that's four files I can be editing at the same time without having to flip through a bunch of desktops or windows sitting on top of each other, which can get pretty old pretty fast. Many times I just want to be able to look at a piece of code really quickly, instead of having to switch through a whole bunch of windows sitting on top of each other.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think with all the fucking Microsoft products you're endorsing in your post (let's see, Flight Sim, Outlook, MSVS, IE, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, NT) you could grow out of saying shit like M$ and IExploder.

Screw graphics... use AGP for GigE networking!!

[toddpw]

As evidenced by the NetBSD support, AGP is essentially a PCI-bridge-plus-frills with only one PCI device on it: your graphics card. It also adds snazzy stuff like the command FIFO (which if you study I2O, you will note is generally useful and not just a graphics processor concept).

The electrical simplicity of supporting only one card plays a large part in allowing it to be so much faster than the normal PCI bus. It's only a matter of time before you end up wanting AGP speeds for:

1. graphics
2. disk
3. network

Since the most normal PCI slots you want on a single bridge is four, you could have a reasonably balanced motherboard with 3AGP+4PCI ... assuming the expansion card vendors agree to make AGP versions of things.

Re:Screw graphics... use AGP for GigE networking!!

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't seem to be much point of this, what with pci-x and pci-express comming along...

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Anonymous Coward]

Either:
1. suck it up and get an 8500 AIW
2. Radeon 7500 64MB DDR PCI Dual Head for video, keep 128 AIW in AGP
3. get a 8500 and a TV Wonder VE for about 30$

VRAM gets small and fast

[Vegan Pagan]

The point of fast AGP is letting VRAM act less like RAM (big and slow) and more like cache (small and fast). However, games are currently programmed for the former setup, so AGP 8X won't improve performance yet, nor will cache-like VRAM.

Re:VRAM gets small and fast

[Forkenhoppen]

I'm curious how one could program games to take advantage of the latter. Perhaps you know something about the OpenGL and Direct3D specs that I don't?

Direct3D currently does texture caching on it's own whenever you (as a programmer) choose to use "managed textures." If you try to run a (DirectX) game made for 64 megs on a 32 meg card, that hit you take is, more often than not, the textures swapping into "cache" every frame. Since any game programmer worth his salt has already optimized his engine to minimize texture set calls, you shouldn't often run into the situation where you're swapping the same texture in and out again. (Unless, of course, you need to render a lot of transparent textures, in which case you're screwed, since they all have to be rendered in Z-order. So even if some are the same, they can't be grouped. But I digress.)

In OpenGL, you can do caching too. You're just forced to do it all yourself. This can be helpful, because then you can tune the caching algorithm yourself... but then again, you can write your own caching system for Direct3D too, if you want, so it's not really a notch in OpenGL's favour not having this feature..

Here's a little tip; the big difference between ATi and nVidia cards for most games isn't the raw power of the card. No, it's the time spent making state changes. (That includes texture changes.) ATi cards are notoriously bad for running at one third of optimal if you don't optimize (and by optimize, I mean group 'em to minimize 'em) every single state call in your engine. nVidia just writes faster state change code; that's why their cards seem faster.

Not that this should really surprise most people. ATi's never been really renowned for their drivers. But it's just one of those things that can be really damaging. Especially when an engine programmer makes the assumption that hey, it doesn't matter if we set all these render states, the driver will optimize out those that aren't needed, and, lo and behold, ATi's don't..

Now mind you, I haven't played with a 9700. You never know; the times, they may be a changin'. But the 8500 drivers had this, and every card before it from them that I can remember.

SysAdmins LOVE multiple monitors

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a sysAdmin; I have one screen watching a network-wide SYSLOG log and various other network monitoring tools, another screen for email, MP3 Player, misc crap, and my central window for whatever I'm actively working on. I couldn't live without it, one screen is just NOT enough. The only problem is finding cards with VGA BIOS Disable switches. Scrounging through the PC Graveyard at work usually does the trick, but I'm running out of dead PCs. Any suggestions?

Provided they are all the same, other limits...

[accident]

Due to various driver and graphical resources and features needing to be on all cards, the combinations allowed and the features supported (in multi head mode) are quite limiting. Usually the driver supports a few models of card and you end up with a very fixed system that you can't expand later.

2D has been supported to varying degrees in X and Win98 for some time, allowing the desktop to span multiple cards from different vendors. With varying amounts of acceleration, Blting is easy, other features often fall back to software. Video overlay can be broken, degraded or only work on the first monitor.

The situation is worse for 3D. Some dual or more setups will only 3D accelerate the first monitor, or the monitors on the first card. FWIW MS-Flight-Sim does 3 heads but its in 2D mode.

All support for 3D-MultiHead so far is pretty much driver based, when graphic-library implementation support (openGL) is more appropriate.

The DRI is hoping to implement a more general system where accelerated features are exposed on all heads, at all times, span cards from different manufactures, and can share/use/display multiple applications at the same time.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[PacoTaco]

I'm curious about his desk. That's like 200 pounds of monitor.

Just a though....

[zannox]

But how about we get AGP4X working....Come on, out off all the /. crowd, a good part of you are running AMD CPU's. There is also a good chance that the AMD CPU is running on a VIA chipset. Anyone that does will know EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Windows/Linux doesn't matter you can set your card to AGP4X but "May run into instabilities or other irregularities"....They (Nvidia/VIA/MicroSoft/Linux) all say to put it at AGP2X "Because there is very little difference between the two and that the frame loss is minute"

So do I

A) Believe the above, and think their email's & tech support are liars
B) Believe tey above is load of crap and all those crashes I have with AGP4X is a figment of my imagination. That when I set it to AGP2X they go away and 3DMark 2001 show less than 20 points difference between AGP2X & AGP4X

Just think with AGP8X, I can finally cause a system seizure on more than one freakin $399.99 card. And in more than one OS! Yeah!

Re:Just a though....

[buck_wild]

Interesting. I have an ASUS MB with a VIA chipset, and I noticed a marked improvement in game performance when I updated my bios and switched from AGP2x to AGP4x.

I've had that setup for the past year, with same Win2k install. I've had less than five bluescreens, though I do reboot my machine on a weekly basis to clear up any memory issues.

Re:Just a though....

[zannox]

I don't have any prolems with the system other than games use to freeze alot if you played them for say over an hour. Isn't heat because I water cool my system and graphics card. I haven't mod'ed any of the system board, no over clocking of the video nothing. I'm running an Abit KR7A-133RAID & AthlonXP2100. I've had the same problem on Asus, MSI, Abit etc.....
All the same hardware on and Intel Chipset...not even one problem...even....

Re:Just a though....

[snillfisk]

Heh. I bought an ATI Radeon 9700 (woha, 8x!!) and an SiS 648-based motherboard (Asus P4S8X) which actually is able to do AGP 8x .. The result? The bios / motherboard refuses to even POST (like, before getting the display) .. not even a sound. Remove the 8x-card and insert a 4x-card.. and voilà, it works. Put the 8x-card in a 4x motherboard, voilà, it works. Currently its just to quirky anyways for any practical use (bad specs? bad implementation?) ..

oh, new motherboard arriving in a few hours .. *grin*

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Anonymous Coward]

And 250 pounds of dweeb.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[th1nk]

Multiple monitor setups are often used in the financial world. I use 3 19" monitors as a daytrader. My screens are filled with real-time streaming charts and data all day long. I know other daytraders that use up to 14 monitors. Sure, 14 is excessive, but it is not uncommon for traders to run 6-8 monitors.

Draw!

[qnonsense]

• Don't buy ATI Radeons for duel-head! I have an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro and the second monitor has a shadow on it, not unusable, but annoying.

Of course there's a shadow on it! With Duel-Head, your monitors are too busy slapping each other with white gloves, demanding satisfaction and poping caps at each other at high noon!! With all the tumbleweeds blowing by, how can you expect those poor GPUs to actually refresh their frame buffers!!

Oh, I get it!!! You meant Dual-Head!

Nevermind. My bad.

Re:Draw!

[charon_on_acheron]

"Of course there's a shadow on it! With Duel-Head, your monitors are too busy slapping each other with white gloves, demanding satisfaction and poping caps at each other at high noon!! With all the tumbleweeds blowing by, how can you expect those poor GPUs to actually refresh their frame buffers!!"

I wish you guys would stop doing this stuff to me when I have a low blood-caffeine level.

"Oh, I get it!!! You meant Dual-Head! "

Cut that out.

Re:Draw!

[bryan1945]

"We do not care about your low fluid levels. Only the strong will survive. You are inferior, you will be consumed. We are the WinBorg."

Nachos!

Re:Draw!

[GargoyleMT]

I missed the part where you explained why mixing up the words "dual" and "duel" is acceptable.

Please clarify.

Re:Draw!

[charon_on_acheron]

I think you have me mixed up with the original poster. I was just commenting on the Monitor Without a Name post. (Insert lonely whistle sound here.) OVer all, after I figured it out, it was very funny.

Bus branching

[Octal]

So, when I run lspci -t on my PC, the AGP bus is actually a subset of the main PCI bus, and every other PC I've checked (3 total) has the AGP branching off the PCI bus. It seems to me that before you go around speeding up AGP you should probably fix that first.

Re:Bus branching

[Anonymous Coward]

On modern Intel chipsets (8xx), the AGP bus does not hang of the PCI bus. It is actually *much* closer to the processor as it physically originates on the GMCH.

However, the AGP bus is part of the same naming convention as PCI. That is why you see it listed
as a 'PCI' bus.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you pay for MS products and use IE on NT4.

Graphics Arrays?

[yokem_55]

The upcoming specs for DX9 and OGL 2.0 have features (128-bit color, displacement mapping, much bigger shader program support) that can begin to render in real time stuff that used to only be possible on the massive render farms owned by folks like Pixar and SKG Dreamworks. However the fist chips that impliment these features, the Radeon 9700 and nVidia's NV30 likely don't have sufficient performance to be able to make heavy use of these features realistically using only one chip.

However, when using AGP 3.0 (AGP 8x) it is possible to put more than one AGP device on a port, and thus massive SLI configurations can be made realistically enabling the heavy use of the new DX9 and OGL2 features. ATI or nVidia may design boards with 4 or 8 chips per board, all running off of one AGP slot (would probably require and external power supply) that they couls sell for a few grand a peice to companies wishing to get into the realtime, high fidelity, near realistic 3d graphics buisness.

Re:Graphics Arrays?

[Anonymous Coward]

surely not though, because if it becomes an accelerated graphics BUS, it'll half the bandwidth between the two cards. and that as I recall, is the major bottleneck, not the gpu.

It takes a while

[briancnorton]

There wasnt really a noticable improvement from PCI to AGP, or AGP 1x to 2x. What you see is cards getting faster, and assume it's the silicon. The fact is that the faster bus is required to support the faster cards. The bus itself wont do squat for you, but a Geforce 9 aint running on AGP 4x.

OT: Give credit where credit is due.

[copponex]

Yes, oh yes, the Dead Milkmen.

-Dean

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[ergo98]

While you most certainly don't need multiple AGP ports for multi-monitor (there are several solutions: Most video cards nowadays let you multihead with a single card. Examples: GF4 4400 (using that in this PC right now), ATI 8500, Matrox (Matrox even has a triple head solution). Occasionally you need to get a DVI->VGA adapter for the second port if you don't have a DVI LCD screen, but it isn't a biggie.

Right now as I type this I'm typing on the right monitor while on the left monitor I have a game of Urban Terror going (I'm dead right now so I have some downtime). Normally I use dual-monitors to have documentation (i.e. web sites, MSDN, etc) open on one monitor and the development environment on the other. It really is brilliant and I find it difficult operating without it now.

Little performance gain?

[Anonymous Coward]

If going from 2X->4X->8X only makes a slight increase in the performance, then what is the actual source of the bottleneck?

Re:Little performance gain?

[jetmarc]

> If going from 2X->4X->8X only makes a slight increase in the performance, then what
> is the actual source of the bottleneck?

Cards avoid use of the AGP bus bandwidth as much as possible, by supplying on-board RAM.
Stuff is uploaded once, and then used many times. Todays cards offer 64 or 128 MB for this
purpose.

Unless texture size or level size grows dramatically, the AGP bus bandwidth suffices.
In Q3A for example, level textures are uploaded during map-changes, and from then on
only T&L data travels through the AGP bus.

Marc

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...yeah. I would have shat if http://44444444444444.444444444444.444/ had been a valid link.

But I envy your numerage. Party on.

Ok, now I'm confused.

[Rip!ey]

And remember kids: the more monitors you have, the larger your penis is!

[Looks up to see a single 15 inch]

[Looks down to see another 15 inches]

Yup. Now I'm confused.

ATI's drivers do not suck, they...

[woogieoogieboogie]

...only show how much you suck.

If you RTFM and uninstall any older drivers and set the video card to plain SVGA, you will have no problems with ATI drivers.

If you try to install them over another card, you can have huge problems, but RTFM and avoid them.

Re:ATI's drivers do not suck, they...

[kingOFgEEEks]

not to flame, but i'm an end (l)user... i should be able to plug and play (btw: i did just that, but i have to complain because if it doesn't work for me, it doesn't work for someone else.)

WireGL

[certron]

How about being able to make smaller graphics clusters?

WireGL comes to mind, but apparently it is now part of the Chromium project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/chromium/

I figure that would be a groovy way to make use of multiple ports.

Anyone want to donate $150,000 to me for researching how cool Quake 3 or UT2003 looks on 16 monitors? Uh... for purely scientific research, of course.

general purpose CPUs are too cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Not much probably. CPU get faster so fast that your expensive (low-volume!) dedicated hardware has to pay back for itself in a very short time. Otherwise you are better off doing nothing for a year, then buying one of the new cheap general purpose CPUs, starting your calculation, and still finishing earlier than the dedicated hardware -- an approach known as the slackers gambit.

For a historical perspective, look at the tremendous advantages that dedicated hardware gave the Amiga, Atari ST and MSX, in comparison to the IBM PC architecture. Look where they are today.

Re:general purpose CPUs are too cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Dedicated Hardware on the ST?

Um... what dedicated hardware? The AY8912 that had featured in 8bit machines dating from as far back as about 1981?

The same applies to the MSX, just about... I guess the MSX2 and later are a different kettle of fish.

And the Amiga was way ahead... :)

Of course, that's the same approach as a modern PC really... GPU, SPU (EMU10K1 on SBLive, for example) ...

Re:general purpose CPUs are too cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to the IBM PC. It didn't even have a soundchip and CGA, or _maybe_ EGA graphics. So yes even though the ST/MSX/Amiga don't seem like much today they were _way_ ahead of the IBM in terms of builtin hardware capability. Of course the PC had genericity; and it won.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Try a stand alone TV card like the AT Wonder VE I think it's called? Also, I think the Radeon 7500 AIW is an outstanding card, if your not totally into the 3d game thing. I personally have a 7500 AIW and it's nice. It has the analog tuner versus the digital one of the 8500 series. The 8500 AIW is also only like 150 now that the 9700 AIW is out now (I think the 8500 128 MB AIW is 150 after a rebate at Compusa now). Saw that after I came home with my 7500. Oh well. At least the Radeon seems to like framebuffer stuff better then my old card. Could never get a frame buffer console to work on my old Nvidia card. It seems with the Radeon I see it when I wasn't able to before. Hopefully I will get a entirely new system from Gateway (I am getting damn tired of building shit). The one I am looking at is the 500XL with the 18 inch LCD! Yummy! And it also has a DVD burner on it too. All for only 1799! That one would be my primary Windows machine while this one will be my Linux machine. It's not too shabby now itself....Athlon XP 2000+, ASUS A7S333 (I know, 333 DDR ram is not worth the extra bucks, but now I have it when I will need it), ATI Radeon AIW 7500, WD 40 GB 7200 RPM hard disk, Creative Live 5.1, DVD-ROM and my little 8x CD-RW. Oh and the AIW came with the Wonder Remote which is AWESOME! Even has Linux support.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[afidel]

Ever hear of flat panels? They have these nice 20" ones that weigh about 20lbs. If they were tubes it would be closer to 250lbs (Sony 21" Trinitrons come out at just over 76lbs apiece). Plus any desk that couldn't support a couple hundred pounds of static load is not one I want to work at. Just imagine leaning against it with your palm, you would go right through it!

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah crap, now I gotta clean the drool out of the keyboard again.

Dual Gigabit NICs

[vonsneerderhooten]

I'm envisioning a server....
Its got 2 AGP ports...
And a PCI graphics card?!?!!
Dual Gigabit AGP NICs*...
Mmmm...Erotic Cakes....

-D

*Assuming someone's smart enough to make them

Re:Dual Gigabit NICs

[Anonymous Coward]

well that'd be a neat trick... AGP NICs... too bad they wouldn't be worth shit since AGP is great for *downstream* bandwidth, not up.... How many people do you know that pass information INTO the video bus?

God no..

[Inoshiro]

I'd rather have slower progressive scan than faster interlaced anyday. That's why I prefer monitors over TVs.

If you want better looking 3D acceleration, look into motion blur. Properly done, a blurred 25FPS render can look as good to the eye as a 120FPS static render with no blur. Don't believe me? Go watch a movie in a theatre. Each frame captures that captures a hand in motion tricks the eye into seeing it that much "clearer" than a faster camera would look.

Re:God no..

[Shalda]

I'd rather have slower progressive scan than faster interlaced anyday. That's why I prefer monitors over TVs. If you want better looking 3D acceleration, look into motion blur. Properly done, a blurred 25FPS render can look as good to the eye as a 120FPS static render with no blur. Don't believe me? Go watch a movie in a theatre. Each frame captures that captures a hand in motion tricks the eye into seeing it that much "clearer" than a faster camera would look.

120 FPS is impossible on my system: my monitor has a refresh rate of of only 85 hertz. Seriously, the bottleneck isn't the AGP bus. It's usually the GPU and the CPU.

Use it as a special expansion slot

[Craigj0]

How about game makers or other highly CPU intensive program makers use it as a cartridge slot. Sure it needs to be moved so that it is in a good position. Remember the old computers that could play megadrive games. Do this but the cartridge is actually some sort of dedicated hardware for use by the application. Make them hot swapable and it would be great. Hmm need some more graphics power plug in my graphics cartridge. Need to do some DSP plug in a different cartridge. We really need a versitle port for something like this.

how useful

[GunFodder]

...And you can get three times as much hex dump on the same BSOD spread across 3 screens :)

3 20" flat screens?

[GunFodder]

I didn't know Bill Gates posted on Slashdot! He's the only one that could afford that kind of setup.

Re:3 20" flat screens?

[afidel]

um one of our sunblade 1000's costs so much that 3 20" flat panels costs less then the memory upgrade to 8GB. Since every employee is expected to drive a minimum of $1 million in revenue per year and makes well over 6 figures it kind of makes sense to spend a couple thousand (or maybe even $10k or more) to make them as productive as possible. It's like with our recent 4 way 32GB memory Sun server, sure it cost like $80K but since a mask costs over $750K if it helps find one bug that would have taken a mask spin it has payed for itself almost 10X over.

what about latency?

[GunFodder]

PCI-X will be a high-frequency serial interface, like RAMBUS. Isn't AGP a dedicated parallel port to the north bridge? It seems likely to me that the latency of AGP is lower than that of PCI-X, and latency is very important for graphics.

Not that it matters. Every new MB will have AGP8x built-in whether you want it or not, which means it is basically a free feature.

16 cards? Pah, nothing...

[irritating environme]

In college (circa 1994) my comp sci graphics prof talked about the research system he was working on: 1 processor/pixel but heck I'll take 1 card/line. How far are we from good real-time raytracing with refraction effects and the like, anyway?

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[joto]

Yeah. Being a hobbyist keyboardist, I've looked into some of these virtual instruments myself, to connect to my sequencer setup. What I can't for the life of me understand is why they all (1) have a GUI, that (2) mimics the real instruments, and is therefore impossible to use, and (3) all take up a lot of screenspace showing useless logos, VU-meters, buttons that don't work, etc...

What I want is something that I can easily control from my midi-instrument(s), not some useless knob on the screen to fiddle with. Alternately, keyboard/mouse control would be useful, but turning round knobs on the screen is completely useless... And they should not use up screen-space

traders

[leuk_he]

But i think if you ask them how many cpu's are attached to their 8 monitor setup they don't have a clue.

A new troll is born

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, I hope you succeed where trollaxor has failed.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[checkyoulater]

I'm kind of curious; could someone please come up with some creative ideas here?

I have often thought about using a second AGP slot for something like a RAID or SCSI card. Perhaps event the main one, on a machine that doesn't really need high-performance video. Or perhaps an AGP sound card? Something that is able to hold a sample set of several hundred megabytes?

Of course, I don't know much about the specifics of how AGP works. Still, it should be technically possible to use all that bandwidth for something aside from 3D accellerators.

Niche market???

[purrpurrpussy]

OK - it would be nice to put 4 NV30s or whatever on one board but apart from flight sims and the stupidly rich why the hell would you want to?

For scientific computing, medical visualisation and CGI I can see that there _may_ be a need for this but what about the average user or geek?

PC Games are no longer pushing the barrier of 3D graphics - the most popular game out there is "The Sims" which will run on just about anything. Windows makes no use of this stuff (and doesn't even need to). If you want games buy a console - and this is what hundreds of millions of people have done.

Why is it so difficult to get ergonomic, cheap, reliable, USEFUL computers? Most PCs are sold to companies for office and email duties this sort of progress is of no use to them yet Windows (or the machine) will still crap on them 2 or 3 times a day - this costs them money.

People want computers that have a use not just eye candy or spec sheets - this is what they are sold. I firmly believe that one of the main reasons for the downturn in PC sales is that a few years ago a lot of people went out and bought Celeron type machines. They never found a decent use for them and are not going to buy a new one esp. as it will cost them 700 to 1500 pounds.

Other data

[Andy Dodd]

AGP's primary goal is to accelerate texture uploads, but in modern video cards, as one other person pointed out, there's a lot of other data that needs to be uploaded too.

Also, I recall (long ago), John Carmack talking about various limitations in video subsystems, and at that time, simply sending geometry data was beginning to saturate PCI buses. As polygon counts increase, I think that factor will be more and more important.

One-way street

[Andy Dodd]

Think of it similar to an asymmetric net connection (cable modem, DSL) - It's optimized to transfer data REALLY FAST in only one direction.

Despite the obscene bandwidth of AGP, a few months ago there was an article on /. pointing to some people who ran some tests on capture from the framebuffer - They managed 10 FPS even at 640x480. PCI can do 30 fps raw video at 640x480 without breaking a sweat. (Look at any Bt8x8-based TV tuner card)

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Anonymous Coward]

...and use IE on NT4.

If you still insist on using NT4, you deserve all the trouble you get.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[fkamogee]

Actually, at work, I've switched from the Matrox G450 DualHead to a card based on the nVidia GeForce4 MX, and never looked back. The nVidia drivers are much better (read: better features, less finicky, more reliable), at least on windows. nVidia does offer a linux driver package on their website, but I haven't used linux on this particular machine, so I can't report on the quality of them.

In addition to the better drivers, the 3D capabilities of the GeForce4 MX blow the G450 DualHead clear out of the water, as expected; and 3D actually *is* useful for things other than games. One example is the ability to add variable transparency to almost any window, without the performance hit of software like WindowBlinds.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[foxtrot]

In gaming, you could use multiple POV's in flight simulators (I think M$ flight sim supports three monitors, IIRC), or racing (Front, left, right).

In this day and age, it's not as useful for realistic racing; what with HANS or Hutchens devices and closed helmets, you really can't see much left or right anyhow. It's not quite as bad as the tunnel-vision you get from using just a single monitor, but it's close.

That being said, it'd still be cool for those of us just having fun. :) For those looking for "simulation", well, put headphones on under your helmet and hope the spotter doesn't suck...

I currently have two monitors on my machine at home, and I wonder how I ever survived before I did. Cranking up the resolution is nice, but having another monitor sitting there, even at a piddly 1280x1024, is just so sweet.

As for three, well, I wish I had that much desk space. I really shouldn't be trying to cram two monitors on my desk. :)

-JDF

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[budalite]

I begin to see why other people think we are strange. Not that I care, but as I am reading your post, one half of my brain is saying, "WOW. Yeah." & the other half is just shaking its head. This may be why women wear silly stuff -- because they can. :{)||

AGP still pretty useless

[Joe5678]

AGP 4x 8x 16x isn't going to do much, it's still vastly slower than local memory on the graphics card. AGP just allows your graphics card to get textures directly from system memory if they are not loaded into local memory already. So that's great the first time you want the texture, but anytime after that it should be stored on the card. If it's not stored on the card, you're textures are going to thrash, AGP or not.

So basically until it's just as fast to use AGP and system memory, as it is to use the memory local on the graphics card, AGP isn't going to do squat for you except reduce thrashing a bit (and once again, if you get to the point of thrashing, your performance is screwed anyway, AGP 4x or AGP 8x)

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Lord Kestrel]

I've got a pair of 21" monitors on my desk, and it doesn't leave too much room for me. It can be annoying at times, but the extra 1900x1440 I get out of the second one is really nice.

The only way I can see getting 3 would be to swap out these tubes for flat panels, and arranging them in a semi-circle around my desk. I'd actually gain some space most likely, so maybe it'd be worth trying to convince the boss.

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Lord Kestrel]

One warning about the ATI Tv Wonder VE. I have one, and the software that comes with it (ATI Multimedia Center) is old. This causes a problem with the Multimedia Center that comes with your Radeon. The Radeon versin is 7.5 I think, but the TV version is 5 something. Or close enough. I had numerous problems with these products trying to coexist. I basically got it to where I could watch tv on my computer, but the dvd features were disabled. I ended up just ditching the tv card, and buying a decent tv (Sony 36XBR800). I hooked a dvd player up to it, and now I don't need any of that stuff on my computer. Plus, the quality on the tv is FAR superior to what I used to get off of my computer. And the dvds look better too (besides displaying much larger).

AGP + PCI

[jbarlow]

I used a Matrox for a while (ooh, I've got AGP to both screens!) for 3d animation. I've since switched to a better 3d card and a nice PCI card, since Photoshop and Premiere need no nice 3d performance.

I have a feeling that in your situation, you could set your game to run on a GF4 or something, and run your IDE on a PCI card with a high refresh...

And then, when you want to test for lowest common denominator systems, you can just switch!

Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Unless you have the AIW, which I have. :) AIW is the best solution, to me, if you want to watch TV on your computer with Windows anyway. I had a Pinnicle card and it gave me nothing but trouble when I tried to get it working on Windows XP. Linux has been the best (strange ain't it?) for TV card support. Even the AIW cards seem to have decent support in Linux. Even the Wonder Remote thingy (very cool by the way). That's why when I get my new machine, my current one will be dedicated to Linux. Sure, you can't get guideplus (another very cool feature of the AIW line), but I really don't care about that too much. Does anyone know of a similar program for Linux?