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

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

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: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.