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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."
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...
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
While things like AGP 8x are useless today, we might need them tomorrow. When AGP 4x would be starving cards.
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.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
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.
Debugging full-screen 3D games. Right now I use a Matrox dualhead card, but it would be nice to have two independent adapters.
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...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
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.
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.
... 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.
Two AGP slots would be nice
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
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
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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".
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
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.
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.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
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