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Gold/Mining/Energy : Day trading in Canada

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To: keith massey who wrote (1811)12/14/1998 1:03:00 AM
From: keith massey  Read Replies (2) of 4467
 
the AGP card will run on average 2-3 times faster than the same PCI card

I would like to now take back this misleading and incorrect statement. It's a good thing that people are out ready to correct my ignorance.

I was under the impression that during "absolute peak" performance the theoretical larger bandwidths of AGP allowed for far better performance compared to PCI cards. This wasn't from a sales person but a tech friend of mine who rarely stears me wrong. I had also read a couple of research article put out by companies saying statements like:

The theoretical bandwidths of AGP and PCI are 533 MB/sec and 133 MB/sec, respectively. With existing systems, we can demonstrate greater than 330 MB/sec through AGP. Due to contention with other devices on the PCI bus and the lack of pipelining, PCI offers roughly 80 MB/sec. Even without using any of the extra features of AGP, the AGP bus runs at 66 MHz and the PCI bus runs at 33 MHz so AGP provides double the data rate

I have now done a little more reading on the subject after your posts and see the errors in my ways. However Chief and I both have AGP and PCI cards. Although the AGP card may not be 2-3 times faster they still appears to be slightly faster. I don't see why you wouldn't want the AGP card as your primary card if you already had one??

In my defense on statements of AGP - taken from Tom's Hardware

AGP Texturing Becoming More Important

This brings me right to the next interesting topic. It seems as if the star of the AGP incapable 3Dfx products Voodoo2 and Voodoo Banshee is due to fall within the next 3-6 months. Finally AGP texturing is becoming really important, the first applications that use a large amount of high resolution textures will hit the shelves pretty soon.

Gabe Newell, Managing Director of Valve L.L.C., the game developer company that will bring us the highly impressive ‘Half-Life' 3D action game and Quake Arena competitor, was giving his opinion on future 3D texture demands. He made clear that the biggest problem with 3D accelerators is the texturing issue, whilst he was satisfied with the polygon and fill rate of the latest 3D accelerators. Half-Life will be using about 40 MB of textures and this although the amount of textures and thus the level of detail has already been reduced, so that the game can run on 3Dfx chipset cards. It is certainly not in our interest that the visual detail of a 3D game is reduced only because 3Dfx can't supply an AGP implementation. S3's high texture Q2 level ‘newS3' and the according demo ‘mon2.dm2' have already shown that AGP can indeed become an issue and NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is the current leader in AGP performance. Half-Life has the potential of becoming a very successful 3D game and it wouldn't surprise me if Quake Arena should also use a much larger amounts of high resolution textures than Quake 2 does right now. This could have a serious impact on the sales of the current


Best Regards
KEITH



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