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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (40149)	10/26/1998 3:37:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573850

Ali, first of all, I have the same AGP spec right here in front of me. You don't have to repost any PDF link to it. <First, the AGP is not for free for system performance - continuous pumping of textures does interfere with system eating up the precious system performance.> Read the debate in the articles posted in Tom's Hardware Guide between Bret McComas and Real3D. No one is claiming that AGP texturing comes for free. But even downloading textures into local DRAM on the graphics card is much better via AGP than with PCI. And game developers are breaking out with larger and larger textures every day. <Second, the AGP is good only on streaming data, but for other plain 2-D tasks they had to keep a back door, in a form of supplementary PCI-like channel, but with lower performance than regular PCI!> Sorry, Ali, you're plain wrong on this one. For 2-D tasks, you can either mix in PCI-semantic transactions with AGP transactions, or you can use the same AGP protocol for 2-D as well as 3-D data transfers. Even if you use the AGP bus like a 66 MHz PCI bus, it's still faster than a 33 MHz PCI bus. I don't know where you get the idea that the PCI-semantic transactions on AGP is slower than regular PCI. <Third, the whole idea assumes that Intel' CPU will be capable to provide the whole rendering while they can't keep the pace with specialized 3D rendering hardware for obvious reasons.> That's even better for both Intel and AMD, don't you think? AGP helps widen the graphics bandwidth so that faster CPU's will have room to grow. <Forth, manufacturers of video DRAMs did not sleep on laurels and come up with affordable products. If you check out, say, BestBuy, you may find out a bunch of 3-D video cards with 16MB of memory, for just $129! This is the market answer to Intel's AGP "innovation" - 16MB Voodoo-accelerated card for $129.> Once again, read the debate on Tom's Hardware Guide. How much local graphics memory is enough? Do you think all that memory on one graphics card comes for free, not to mention the ability to address it all? What are you going to do with all that memory when it's not in use? How the heck are you going to update textures within the graphics memory through a slower, non-pipelined PCI bus? Why should you have to lock out other PCI devices like sound cards, disk controllers, etc., doing texture transfers when you can have a nice independent AGP port? <Any more questions, my dear Intelfriend?> Yeah. Why are the Super 7 chipset designers incorporating AGP into their designs? Could it be that there are some real advantages to AGP? Nah, that would be giving the Evil Empire too much credit, and we know that's a taboo these days. Tenchusatsu

To: Ali Chen who wrote (40149)	10/27/1998 12:25:00 AM
From: dumbmoney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573850

Second, the AGP is good only on streaming data, but for other plain 2-D tasks they had to keep a back door, in a form of supplementary PCI-like channel, but with lower performance than regular PCI! Ali, you should leave the discussion of technical matters to people who have a clue. You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. Forth, manufacturers of video DRAMs did not sleep on laurels and come up with affordable products. If you check out, say, BestBuy, you may find out a bunch of 3-D video cards with 16MB of memory, for just $129! This is the market answer to Intel's AGP "innovation" - 16MB Voodoo-accelerated card for $129. This is completely irrelevent. There will always be less video memory available than main memory, and hence there will always be a need to move texture data quickly. Not to mention, the higher bandwidth is also needed to moving other types of data as well. But hey, nobody's forcing you to use a high speed bus for your graphics card. In fact you can still get ISA cards, so you don't have to use the evil PCI that Intel is trying to foist on you.