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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
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.
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
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.
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.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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
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.
- 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!"