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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."
I dont recall seeing much of an increase from agp 2x to agp 4x either so I'm no surprised
People seem much brighter once you light them on fire.
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
AGP 8x == small bridge to PCI-X == waste of money
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".
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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?
Be a man! View at -1
acm.cs.uwec.edu
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.
32X! Go sega!!! Then i can play all 4 games i bought for it.
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)"
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.
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.
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
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
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
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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...
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.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
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.
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'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
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.
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 )
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
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....
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?
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.
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.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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.
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.
I'm curious about his desk. That's like 200 pounds of monitor.
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.
- 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.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
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.
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
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.
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.
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.
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
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.
Gorkman
in the case of myrinet and fibre channel, yes.
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!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
...And you can get three times as much hex dump on the same BSOD spread across 3 screens :)
I didn't know Bill Gates posted on Slashdot! He's the only one that could afford that kind of setup.
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.
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
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Think of it similar to an asymmetric net connection (cable modem, DSL) - It's optimized to transfer data REALLY FAST in only one direction.
/. 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)
Despite the obscene bandwidth of AGP, a few months ago there was an article on
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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).
:) For those looking for "simulation", well, put headphones on under your helmet and hope the spotter doesn't suck...
:)
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.
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
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. :{)||
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?
Gorkman