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Technology Stocks : 3DFX
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To: Matt Webster who wrote (7375)9/18/1998 11:29:00 AM
From: Chip Anderson  Read Replies (1) of 16960
 
Re: TDFX not going AGP AND Local Ram

Huh? Banshee is AGP and supports local RAM. I'm sure Rampage will be also. Keep in mind that there is a big difference between being "AGP" and using "AGP Texturing."

AGP allows the motherboard to communicate with the graphics card at relatively high-speeds (relative to PCI, etc.). This is very helpful for things like triangle setup, etc. Banshee currently supports AGP 1x. For marketing reasons (only!), TDFX is under pressure to update Banshee so that it supports AGP 2x.

"AGP Texturing" is a feature that Intel (who invented AGP) touted highly when it first appeared. They claimed that the AGP bus was so fast that it would allow video chips to pull entire textures out of main memory. See the link I posted previously for why that is not true (even under AGP 4x). Intel was hyping AGP to ensure that the motherboard people would support it. At the time, video memory was very expensive and so it sounded very compelling.

Rampage is supposed to support AGP 4x (with execute mode) but even so, it's not supposed to support AGP Texturing.

So AGP is a good thing (for triangle setup, etc.) and TDFX is supporting it, however, they are not supporting its most hyped (and technically dubious) capability.

Re: Half-Life needing 40MB of texture per screen

Please post a link to your source. I know several of the Half-Life developers and know that their design goal remains a 12MB Voodoo2 card. The majority of their developers and testers use this setup.

Re: I want a 64MB Banshee

Agreed!

Chip
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