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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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!"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.
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.
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!"
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.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
...And you can get three times as much hex dump on the same BSOD spread across 3 screens :)
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