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Technology Stocks : Diamond Multimedia -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brad Patton who wrote (3398)	2/19/1998 2:00:00 AM
From: John R Pierce	Respond to of 4679

The fact is the new games coming out won't require 12MB, however, they will look better and run faster with 12. The extra 4MB of ram on the Voodoo2 12MB boards is purely texture map memory, it is not frame buffer memory, which is fixed at (I believe) 4MB. Games are generally designed for a fixed amount of textures, so they either fit in 4MB texture space (or for that matter, currently 2MB for the voodoo1 4MB cards), or they don't. I'm not sure many game developers will work on multiple texture sets, one for 2MB (Current 4MB Voodoo boards), another for 4MB (mainstream voodoo 2), and yet another for 8MB (12MB Voodoo2 boards). Loading additional textures could in fact cause a performance hit on scene changes (move between rooms, if the game has to swap 8MB of texture maps, its going to take a twice as long as swapping 4MB... this could result in a significant hiccup in gameplay). Other designs such as the i740 and the nVidia Riva can store textures in main memory, so have NO limitations other than bus bandwidth. Something I don't think too many folks have picked up on, btw... The i740 has HALF the memory bandwidth of the Riva128. Seems the 740 has a 64 bit SDRAM/SGRAM bus running at 66 to 100MHz. The Riva has a 128 bit SGRAM bus at 100MHz. The Riva can move 1.6Gbyte/sec bursts, while the optimal i740 configuration is limited to 800Mbyte/sec. This shows up in the maximum refresh rates, it will show up in 2D benchmarks, and, I suspect, in 3D fill rate benchmarks. The Voodoo 2 has dual buses, one for texture maps, and another for video memory. I believe these total 192 bits, and it runs at 100MHz, so it has inherently about 1.5X the raw bandwidth of the Riva128 and 3 times the bandwidth of the i740. Both the Riva and i740 offset this advantage some by using the AGP bus, which can supply 32bit words at 66MHz (or 133MHz in 2X mode).