Ten, <AGP is far from useless, my friend.> Really?
If you are not familiar with motivations for your
own products, read on:
ftp://download.intel.com/pc-supp/platform/agp20.pdf
This is a 3MB .pdf file, so I made an excerpt for
easy readings:
page1:
"1.1 Motivation
In general, 3D rendering has a voracious appetite for memory
bandwidth ... requiring high speed access to ever larger amounts
of memory, thus raising the bill of material costs for 3D
enabled platforms. Containing these costs while enabling
performance improvements is the primary motivation for the
A.G.P. By providing up to an order of magnitude bandwidth
improvement between the graphics accelerator and system
memory, some of the 3D rendering data structures may be
effectively shifted into main memory, relieving the pressure
to increase the cost of the local graphics memory.
Texture data are the first structures targeted for shifting to
system memory for four reasons:
1. Textures are generally read only ...blah-blah,
2. Shifting textures balances the bandwidth ... blah-blah;
3. Texture size is ... blah-blah;
4. Texture data is not persistent.. blah-blah;
...
Reducing costs by moving graphics data to main memory is the
primary motivation for the A.G.P., which is designed
to provide a smooth, incremental transition for today's PCI
based graphics vendors as they develop higher
performance components in the future."
----------------------------------<end of AGP quote>
So, as you see, the whole motivation behind the AGP
were textures, textures, and more textures.
What was miscalculated here are FOUR (!) things.
First, the AGP is not for free for system performance -
continuous pumping of textures does interfere with system
eating up the precious system performance.
Second, the AGP is good only on streaming data, but for
other plain 2-D tasks they had to keep a back door, in
a form of supplementary PCI-like channel, but with lower
performance than regular PCI!
Third, the whole idea assumes that Intel' CPU will be capable
to provide the whole rendering while they can't keep the pace
with specialized 3D rendering hardware for obvious reasons.
Forth, manufacturers of video DRAMs did not sleep on laurels
and come up with affordable products. If you check out, say,
BestBuy, you may find out a bunch of 3-D video cards with
16MB of memory, for just $129! This is the market answer to
Intel's AGP "innovation" - 16MB Voodoo-accelerated card for $129.
Any more questions, my dear Intelfriend? |
