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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chip Anderson who wrote (4019)	6/16/1998 3:08:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Here a response to the Gamecenter 1x/2x AGP slam from Tony Tamasi, tech wonk at 3Dfx: "AGP 2x support is not a necessity for products that are not bandwidth limited. Until you reach about 4+M triangles per second (or about 12x the triangle rate of Quake2) you won't be bus bandwidth limited. (assuming about 100 bytes per triangle - strips and fans can reduce this more as well...) All AGP really is is a fast bus - AGP 2x is a 533MB/sec bus. It can be used for texturing, and/or "traditional" I/O - like moving triangles, downloading textures, sending commands, etc. to the graphics hardware. When it comes to texturing, local texture storage doesn't hurt performance, on the contrary - AGP bandwidth can be limiting for textured performance in some circumstances. Texture bandwidth can actually be the highest user of bandwidth in high fill rate systems, which means that on AGP applications texturing out of main memory may actually run slower than if they were texturing locally." from Blue's News (http://www.bluesnews.com) Basically he's saying that even AGP 2x is not fast enough to allow texturing out of main memory and that AGP 1x cards with local memory for texture storage (like Banshee) will be CPU-limited before they are bus-limited. Chip