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8x AGP for Dual Processing Systems?
Paul E. Loeb asks: "I am wondering if there are any solutions out there that will allow the use of an 8x AGP bus with dual processing support. I prefer AMD Athlon MP, but Xeon would be fine as well. I am looking to build a high-end graphics and video editing system, and I don't want to submit to a single Intel or AMD processor. I do however wish to use a Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX, but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus. Thank you in advance for all of your advice."
why not get a "heavyweight" gfx card like the new Nvidia Quadro FX 1/2000 card. It will provide you with the necessary throuput to handle some serious 3D work, movie editing and give you a year or so of obsolescency protection.
Or better yet get one of these babies!
This is definitely the case for most applications where 128MB easily covers the texture requirements and the only speedup seen is for vertex/instruction buffers. However he specifically states that he's doing high-end graphics and video editing, in which case it's quite reasonable that the increase in bandwidth that 8x provides could significantly improve performance. Remember: games are specifically tuned so that most of the textures remain on the card for significant amounts of time. For example, they design the levels so that at any given position all of the textures necessary to render the surrounding environment and any additional features (characters, weapons, effects, overlays, etc...) will fit in VRAM. However, if you're using a 3d modelling package to create arbitrarily complex environments you can quite easily exceed the VRAM on your card for a single render. At this point bandwith is key, and it is these kinds of situations where specifically-designed graphics workstations (eg. SGI) mop the floor with your $400 games cards.