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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."
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
--ngoy
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!
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
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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.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
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.
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.)
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.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
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.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
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.
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.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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.
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