Alright, I've got this Compaq AP400 Dual PIII 600 Box that I use as the control node for my Lightwave render farm at home. Every now and again I have to use it to tweak a 3D object or scene real quick before final rendering, and I've been trying to find ways to speed up the UI in Lightwave while doing this on a slower machine.
Originally the machine ahd an AGP Matrox card (4MB I think) Which I promptly threw out and replaced with a PCI Radeon 7000 w/ 64MB DDR RAM.
Today however I wanted to see how an AGP card would do in this system, so I removed the ATI card, and the only AGP card I had at home that would fit in the older AGP socket of this system was a Matrox G450 Dual Head card w/ 16MB RAM,(my ATI 9600SE Wasn't socket compatible due to voltage requirements I'm guessing) so thats what I put in. I figured that it would suck, but it is actually 200-300% faster than the ATI card was in lightwave.
WTF? Do PCI cards really suck that bad? Is it just the system architecture of this particular box slowing things down? I realize that there's more bandwidth to play with, in AGP, but if thats the case and a Radeon 7000 is bandwidth limited on the PCI bus why on earth are there FX5200's/5500's and such for PCI. Can anybody shed light on this?
Summary:
Matrox G450 Dualhead 16MB AGP =="Bad ass"
ATI Radeon 7000 64MB PCI =="Pwn3d"
Originally the machine ahd an AGP Matrox card (4MB I think) Which I promptly threw out and replaced with a PCI Radeon 7000 w/ 64MB DDR RAM.
Today however I wanted to see how an AGP card would do in this system, so I removed the ATI card, and the only AGP card I had at home that would fit in the older AGP socket of this system was a Matrox G450 Dual Head card w/ 16MB RAM,(my ATI 9600SE Wasn't socket compatible due to voltage requirements I'm guessing) so thats what I put in. I figured that it would suck, but it is actually 200-300% faster than the ATI card was in lightwave.
WTF? Do PCI cards really suck that bad? Is it just the system architecture of this particular box slowing things down? I realize that there's more bandwidth to play with, in AGP, but if thats the case and a Radeon 7000 is bandwidth limited on the PCI bus why on earth are there FX5200's/5500's and such for PCI. Can anybody shed light on this?
Summary:
Matrox G450 Dualhead 16MB AGP =="Bad ass"
ATI Radeon 7000 64MB PCI =="Pwn3d"