To: Jeff Lins who wrote (7947 ) 10/7/1998 1:50:00 AM From: Michael Linov Read Replies (1) | Respond to
1. Banshee scales relatively well, but is more fill rate limited than a V2 (and certainly a V2 SLI) when running multi-texture games like Quake 2 and Unreal (oddly, unreal runs very well, probably since AGP speeds up the D/L of procedural textures). Equating a Banshee to a V2 isn't completely accurate. A V2 has a 192 bit wide memory interface (64 bit FBI, and 64 bit per TMU), and memory access speed is basically guaranteed. The 128 Bit unified design means a different memory access scheme (which requires a small on chip cache) which requires sharing the frame buffer, texture buffer, and screen refresh on the same 128 bit bus. The approach uses cheaper RAM and has some excellent advantages (Environment mapping, faster reads, high-resolution support, flexible memory usage etc.) Still, Banshee is limited to 100-120 M Texel per sec, while a V2 can do 180-200 M texel per sec, and V2-SLI 360-400 M texel per sec.
