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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."
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?
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.
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?
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".
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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.
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?
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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?
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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!
Karma
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
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
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.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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....
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:
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.
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!
I've nothing of importance to say, now go away before I taunt you with a second sig!
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.
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.