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To: Matt Webster who wrote (7375)	9/18/1998 1:48:00 AM
From: dumbmoney	Respond to of 16960

Half-Life is supposed to have 40 MB of textures. It's fine if TDFX does not believe in AGP, but then why do we not have a Banshee or Voodoo2 with 64 MB of RAM? RAM is supposedly virtually free, right? RAM isn't free, and there's never enough. AGP texturing is a feature that can be used, or not used, as appropriate. Given that it's widely available, some developers are going to find a use for it. Footnote: might this be exactly what Micron has in store for its Rendition-based product, to put gobs of RAM on the graphics card? No, quite the contrary. Micron has defined a socket (Socket X) for graphics chips which use NO external memory (embedded DRAM). Presumably they are designing something to fit into Socket X.

To: Matt Webster who wrote (7375)	9/18/1998 5:08:00 AM
From: Simon Cardinale	Respond to of 16960

Half life 40MB of textures question: 1) Half-Life is supposed to have 40 MB of textures. It's fine if TDFX does not believe in AGP, but then why do we not have a Banshee or Voodoo2 with 64 MB of RAM? RAM is supposedly virtually free, right? Does Half life have 40MB of textures in the game or 40MB of textures on the screen at once? I suspect that it's the former. No game developer concerned with fps is going to rely on AGP 4X on purpose. Too slow. Remember also, that Voodoo1 only has 2MB of texture memory. Most games are written to run at least marginally well on that standard. In the years to come texture quantity will increase, but backward compatibility issues won't allow that move to be a fast one. Banshee and Voodoo2 are way out in front of that (as are our competitors). Soon we'll have 32MB onboard (not all for textures, of course). Simon

To: Matt Webster who wrote (7375)	9/18/1998 11:29:00 AM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Re: TDFX not going AGP AND Local Ram Huh? Banshee is AGP and supports local RAM. I'm sure Rampage will be also. Keep in mind that there is a big difference between being "AGP" and using "AGP Texturing." AGP allows the motherboard to communicate with the graphics card at relatively high-speeds (relative to PCI, etc.). This is very helpful for things like triangle setup, etc. Banshee currently supports AGP 1x. For marketing reasons (only!), TDFX is under pressure to update Banshee so that it supports AGP 2x. "AGP Texturing" is a feature that Intel (who invented AGP) touted highly when it first appeared. They claimed that the AGP bus was so fast that it would allow video chips to pull entire textures out of main memory. See the link I posted previously for why that is not true (even under AGP 4x). Intel was hyping AGP to ensure that the motherboard people would support it. At the time, video memory was very expensive and so it sounded very compelling. Rampage is supposed to support AGP 4x (with execute mode) but even so, it's not supposed to support AGP Texturing. So AGP is a good thing (for triangle setup, etc.) and TDFX is supporting it, however, they are not supporting its most hyped (and technically dubious) capability. Re: Half-Life needing 40MB of texture per screen Please post a link to your source. I know several of the Half-Life developers and know that their design goal remains a 12MB Voodoo2 card. The majority of their developers and testers use this setup. Re: I want a 64MB Banshee Agreed! Chip