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Hello im in the process of buying a graphics card,but i dont know what agpX4 means,can someone please explain it to me.
Hello im in the process of buying a graphics card,but i dont know what agpX4 means,can someone please explain it to me.
It means the AGP bus runs 4x above original spec, which is quite fast. It's to do with how fast data is transferred between the southbridge (or north? can't remember) and your graphics card.
Turbonutter wrote:
> It means the AGP bus runs 4x above original spec, which is quite fast.
> It's to do with how fast data is transferred between the southbridge
> (or north? can't remember) and your graphics card.
AGP is Northbridge :O]
Take a 3D game, say Unreal Tournament 2003. To display the gameworld, the 3D engine must draw polygons (if you've ever seen a wireframe mesh, those are nude polygons), textures (pictures, like a picture of some bark on the side of a tree for example) on the polygons and then apply various cunning lighting effects to make it all look cool. A game like UT2K3 requires lots of textures to display its game world - walk up to a wall and examine how finely detailed it is, for instance, and these textures are stored in video memory, which can be extremely quickly accessed by the graphics chip when needed. This is what the 64MB of "Radeon VE AGP 64Mb DDR 2*Db15 TV-Out" means - the card has 64MB of onboard video memory in which to store textures.
Should you try and run DOOM III or another application that needs more than 64MB of video memory, then the textures spill over into main system memory. Main system memory is slower than video memory, but not a lot slower. The real killer in streaming textures between system memory and the videocard is the bit in the middle - the AGP bus runs hundreds of times slower than memory, and should an application need to drag large amounts of data over the AGP bus then it will take a big hit in performance. This is what an increase in AGP speed gets you - if your textures are overflowing into system memory, then you will experience a speed increase with a faster AGP bus.
Chances are though that if you're filling up your AGP bus, you're taking your graphics card places it wasn't designed to go..
> It means the AGP bus runs 4x above original spec, which is quite fast.
> It's to do with how fast data is transferred between the southbridge
> (or north? can't remember) and your graphics card.
AGP is Northbridge :O]
Take a 3D game, say Unreal Tournament 2003. To display the gameworld, the 3D engine must draw polygons (if you've ever seen a wireframe mesh, those are nude polygons), textures (pictures, like a picture of some bark on the side of a tree for example) on the polygons and then apply various cunning lighting effects to make it all look cool. A game like UT2K3 requires lots of textures to display its game world - walk up to a wall and examine how finely detailed it is, for instance, and these textures are stored in video memory, which can be extremely quickly accessed by the graphics chip when needed. This is what the 64MB of "Radeon VE AGP 64Mb DDR 2*Db15 TV-Out" means - the card has 64MB of onboard video memory in which to store textures.
Should you try and run DOOM III or another application that needs more than 64MB of video memory, then the textures spill over into main system memory. Main system memory is slower than video memory, but not a lot slower. The real killer in streaming textures between system memory and the videocard is the bit in the middle - the AGP bus runs hundreds of times slower than memory, and should an application need to drag large amounts of data over the AGP bus then it will take a big hit in performance. This is what an increase in AGP speed gets you - if your textures are overflowing into system memory, then you will experience a speed increase with a faster AGP bus.
Chances are though that if you're filling up your AGP bus, you're taking your graphics card places it wasn't designed to go..
sounds nifty but actually the performance increase from cards that actually use x8 is pretty slim im using 2x atm ... but oh well.
VRAM stores Textures but.... what if a mx400 has 64mb SDR RAM but a older but more powerful model the geforce 2 GTS has 32mb but the fact it uses DDR RAM, and its clock speed is higher than that of what the mx has.....
Never used x4 in my life this board actually supports it but it refuses to use it.
Next PC i will use 4x tho the only increase in performace will come from my geforce 4 ti....
Never used x4 in my life this board actually supports it but it refuses to use it.
Next PC i will use 4x tho the only increase in performace will come from my geforce 4 ti....
It stores textures, models, information.. anything the GPU needs quickly basically. The faster your RAM, the quicker the GPU gets the stuff it needs to render the frame and the quicker the render is.
If your VRAM is too small though it won't be able to store everything, so it puts it in the system RAM instead. This is where AGP come in, basically the faster the AGP (up to 8x) the faster the GPU can get stuff from the system RAM instead. Obviously it'd rather it be stored in the VRAM, but hey...
If your VRAM is too small though it won't be able to store everything, so it puts it in the system RAM instead. This is where AGP come in, basically the faster the AGP (up to 8x) the faster the GPU can get stuff from the system RAM instead. Obviously it'd rather it be stored in the VRAM, but hey...
Lol no wonder results from 8x cards didnt make much difference....