Extreme Graphics card! ( A must see)

[Marshallj]

I remember when AGP was first coming out, and one of the primary uses for it was that it was supposed to be fast enough to eliminate a video card's on-card memory. It would be able to access the motherboard's memory. But in real life, the speed of doing that was pretty dismal, so cards kept their onboard memory.

A PCI graphics card with onboard memory should still be pretty quick. Not using AGP won't necessarily kill the performance since cards with onboard memory won't be using the high bandwidth of shared memory access anyway. Keeping the card's onboard memory reduces the amount of data that needs to go through the AGP bus.

 

[ProviaFan]

That does appear to be some form of 64 bit PCI or PCI-X.

 

[Intelman07]

With all that "junk" on that board how would you fit that into a standar ATX case? I guess you don't.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Intelman07
With all that "junk" on that board how would you fit that into a standar ATX case? I guess you don't.

It might fit in a standard medium or full tower ATX case - barely, but it is most likely designed to fit in one of those server cases that is twice the width of a standard ATX case.

 

[TerryMathews]

Originally posted by: jliechty
That does appear to be some form of 64 bit PCI or PCI-X.

Probably PCI-X, which would mean it's bandwidth is nearly that of AGP, at a blistering 64 bits of data and 133MHz bus speed. As a matter of fact, unless I'm doing my calculations wrong, PCI-X theoretically has the same bandwidth as AGP4X!

 

[BenSkywalker]

I remember when AGP was first coming out, and one of the primary uses for it was that it was supposed to be fast enough to eliminate a video card's on-card memory.

Heard of the i810 or nForce1/2 IGP? AGP does what they said it would, there are simply those of us who are more then willing to spend extra to get even higher levels of performance.

 

[Fallen Kell]

*drools* wonder how well Quake 3 would look on that

 

[EdipisReks]

the PCI-X tech is going to replace AGP, so don't knock PCI!

 

[EdipisReks]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Heard of the i810 or nForce1/2 IGP?

that isn't quite the same thing, though.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: EdipisReks
the PCI-X tech is going to replace AGP, so don't knock PCI!

Hmm, that's news to me. I thought it was PCI Express that was going to eventually replace AGP.

 

[Marshallj]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

Heard of the i810 or nForce1/2 IGP? AGP does what they said it would, there are simply those of us who are more then willing to spend extra to get even higher levels of performance.

Yeah, I remember those underperforming integrated chipsets. Which supports my case that having the RAM on the card delivers much better performance.

 

[BenSkywalker]

that isn't quite the same thing, though.

Yes it is. Those integrated solutions utilize the ability of AGP to operate without any integrated memory.

Yeah, I remember those underperforming integrated chipsets. Which supports my case that having the RAM on the card delivers much better performance.

Compare the nForce2 IGP to the fastest available board at the introduction of AGP and it slaughters it. AGP texturing has proved to be extremely useful for an enormous portion of the industry. Of course, dedicated on board memory will retain its superior levels of performance for some time. AGP texturing has proven to be one of the biggest advancements in 3D chip design of the last six years looking at the marketplace, it simply isn't a big factor for those of us who are willing to spend the extra money

 

[dguy6789]

Hmm, that's news to me. I thought it was PCI Express that was going to eventually replace AGP. [/quote]


yea, it is, suposed ot start with bandwith of AGP 8X and eventually be at speeds above 10GB/s. But the thing is, why cant they just stick with agp, and make it faster? Like from 2 to 4 to 8X? Maybe a 16X? Whatever it is im sure it will be fine.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: dguy6789

Hmm, that's news to me. I thought it was PCI Express that was going to eventually replace AGP.

yea, it is, suposed ot start with bandwith of AGP 8X and eventually be at speeds above 10GB/s. But the thing is, why cant they just stick with agp, and make it faster? Like from 2 to 4 to 8X? Maybe a 16X? Whatever it is im sure it will be fine.

I think part of the PCI Express concept is to have everything on a unified interface (kind of like the concept for USB with external peripherals). Different slots can be different "widths" to accomodate peripherals of varying bandwidth needs.

 

[Marshallj]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

Compare the nForce2 IGP to the fastest available board at the introduction of AGP and it slaughters it. AGP texturing has proved to be extremely useful for an enormous portion of the industry. Of course, dedicated on board memory will retain its superior levels of performance for some time. AGP texturing has proven to be one of the biggest advancements in 3D chip design of the last six years looking at the marketplace, it simply isn't a big factor for those of us who are willing to spend the extra money

That would be comparing apples to oranges since the chipset is totally different. To get an accurate analysis of the effect of AGP, compare an AGP version of a card with the PCI version that uses the same chipset.

I used to be a test engineer at a MB manufacturer, so I used to have to follow a methodology in doing tests. So I'm quite used to benchmarking, comparing. If you want to compare one feature vs. another, you need to keep everything else identical and only change one aspect of the setup at a time. Comparing an AGP Nforce2 IGP to another AGP chipset tells you more about the graphics chipset than anything else. You could even take a modern PCI card and it'll blow away the old AGP cards, because the chipset is the primary factor involved here.

If you want to see an illustration of the usefulness of AGP, I'll show you the numbers-

Fastest throughput available to AGP (AGP 8X)- 2.1 GB/s throughput

Now compare this to the throughput available to a card with onboard memory...

GeForce4 4200- 7.1 GB/s
GeForce4 4600- 10.4 GB/s
GeForceFX 5600- 11.2 GB/s

As you can see, even the latest incarnation of AGP cannot come close to providing the bandwidth needed by a modern graphics chipset. That's why they've stuck with onboard memory.

Just for kicks, the ancient PCI 3dfx Voodoo2 had 2.2 GB/s memory throughput... even back then (on PCI no less), the data throughput requirements were far beyond what AGP has to offer. Hence, you won't be seeing any performance chipsets accessing the system's memory through the AGP bus anytime soon.

 

[BFG10K]

This board, made by CAE combines four Radeon 8500 GPUs onto a single PCI board.

That alone almost convinces that me it's a fake.

Probably PCI-X, which would mean it's bandwidth is nearly that of AGP, at a blistering 64 bits of data and 133MHz bus speed

But still on a shared bus, unlike AGP's dedicated line.

To get an accurate analysis of the effect of AGP, compare an AGP version of a card with the PCI version that uses the same chipset

That's already been done, many times in fact. Even a lowly GF2 MX has a 10%-20% gain when moving from PCI to AGP and the likes of a 9700 Pro would probably have its performance cut in half on a PCI interface.

AGP transfer speeds are extremely critical to 3D cards, especially with newer games that have very high data loads because of numerous large textures, geometry data and pixel/vertex shading operations and related data.

 

[Marshallj]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
[AGP transfer speeds are extremely critical to 3D cards, especially with newer games that have very high data loads because of numerous large textures, geometry data and pixel/vertex shading operations and related data.

I think we're talking about two different things here...

I'm talking about AGP's shared memory access, which uses the system's main memory as the videocard's video memory.

On an AGP card with its own onboard video memory, it's still going to need to communicate the data through the AGP bus, but it's not going to be using your RAM as video memory. So yes, AGP's i/o speed will be important, but not in the aspect that I'm talking about. That's a separate feature that must be implemented. You can design an AGP video card that does not have the ability to use your RAM as video memory. It would be using the AGP bus simply as a much faster PCI bus. That's what gives you the extra performance, not the shared memory architecture.

Hope this clears it up a little.

 

[Marshallj]

By the way, if you look at my original post, you'll be able to see what I was talking about:

"I remember when AGP was first coming out, and one of the primary uses for it was that it was supposed to be fast enough to eliminate a video card's on-card memory. It would be able to access the motherboard's memory. But in real life, the speed of doing that was pretty dismal, so cards kept their onboard memory"

I'm strictly speaking of the the shared memory aspect of AGP (sidebanding/pipelining). Yes, the overall signalling between CPU and graphics card will be much faster due to AGP's higher speed but that's a completely separate issue... that's only Frame mode. If you saw the logical breakdown of the movement of data you'd see that the CPU>graphics chipset data pipe (frame mode) is not the same as the Sidebanding/pipelining data pipes. Using Sidebanding for all your video card's memory seems good on paper but in practice the sidebanding data pipe just isn't fat enough to be very useful. You can do without using the sidebanding and pipelining pipes and still take advantage of AGP's higher speed between the CPU and graphics chip (frame mode). This will be equivalent to using the AGP slot as if it were a faster PCI slot.

 

[BFG10K]

Yes, I certainly agree that AGP is absolutely no subsitute for VRAM. We still can't live without AGP though, thanks to the other benefits it provides.

I also think that's exactly what Ben was trying to say as well.

 

[Marshallj]

Yeah, I agree.

Sorry I do such a bad thing of explaining things. If you saw it on paper it would make a lot more sense.

 

[Intelman07]

[
That alone almost convinces that me it's a fake.

Does this convince you otherwise?

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Why don't they make one with 2 GPU's for the mainstream market? If they priced it right, they'd be using ATI GPU's and putting em out of business hehe