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To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (12911)	5/22/1999 9:29:00 AM
From: Plaz	Read Replies (1) of 16960

The bandwidth you stated is for AGP in general, not just AGP texturing. Why can't somebody come up with a solution (maybe even at the driver level) that's just as good as AGP texturing if it's necessary to move textures from main memory. If I understand your question (which I may not; I'm sure you'll let me know :-) ), then the answer is no, they can't. The PCI bus is a 33 MHz bus that transfers 32 bits/clock: that is it's physical limitation. There's no driver trick they can do to get more out of it (in fact, the 132MB/sec is a theoretical limit; real world results are somewhat lower). The trick of transferring on both edges of the clock (ala AGP2x) is a hardware trick, not a software one. AGP is a different hardware specification that runs faster. They can't do AGP4x until Intel ships the Camino chipset this fall; the hardware doesn't support it until then. I've written some NT device drivers, and about the only choice at that level is whether to have the CPU do the transfers or the DMA (direct memory address) controller do them. The solution to moving more textures across a fixed speed bus is texture compression. Plaz

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