ATI Radeon (and others) comparison

[SHADES]

A G4 should have plenty of muscle for any ATI graphics card.
May have some bandwith problems on the 2x AGP port and I think the memory is only SDRAM. DDR would be much better and 4X AGP would suffice nicely. I don't know any cards thant reqire the bandwith of an 8x AGP card.

[SHADES]

@Hammer
Yes, some influence. Which would be minimal. Everything increases including the fetch and refresh of memory. Athlon 2.6 Vs 3.0  also has "influence" on framerate. Front side buss to memory etc when CPU handles other "aspects" of games. Of course there is a difference. But that's not to do with graphics card.

The 3D GPU of "todays graphics cards" is designed to take graphics manipulation /calculation AWAY from the CPU, so that the CPU can do other things like run the game,  leaving the grapics to the GPU. That's the whole point.
AGP is part of PCI spec developed to handle the larger data bandwidth needed for graphics that PCI was lagging in. AGP8x is the new AGP3.0 spec.
I will say again, the G4 CPU has more than enough power.

The only thing that may pose a problem is bandwidth for the graphics card. AGP2x is getting a bit dated. AGP8x would be overkill for now, but not too much longer.
8x doesn't nessecerily  mean 8x faster graphics, just bandwidth. There is a difference and yes it can impact.
 Don't be too surprised to see AGP16x soon.

Specs for AGP and bandwidth are easy to find if your interested. Try google.

[SHADES]

Thanks Cymric, you have explained my point better than I am able to put accross. This is exactly the point I was trying to make earlier, that bandwidth is a much larger contributing factor with modern systems ) as long as we look at standards of moving the data around, mainly AGP.
To pass blame that the G4 CPU is to blame for the bottleneck is not entirly true and an unfair statement to make for the G4. Yes CPU speed makes a difference, but it's subtle to that of the restricted data paths that different platforms can have.  Like having an ATi 9800 on a PCI  33Mhz card, or even  A1s SDRAM instead of DDR.

I do however  have to dissagree with your AGP statement about being a marketing scheme.  Yes it sells hardware but there's a bit more to it than that. As I see it FSB rates could also be labled as a marketing schemes but is now proven to increase perfomance, so much so that Athlon have done away with the FSB and gon on die. with their latest offering.

AGP 8x is now standard for 3.0 version of AGP. AGP 2x and 4x have problems with memory bandwith issues.  there is a nice but brief articel on AGP and it's downfalls at
http://www.devhardware.com/hardware/video-cards/212,1/
hopefully wil explain how AGP3.0 or 8x has tried to circumvent those bandwisth issues of the prevoius spec and give insite in what should follow. The 8x? is just refering to the "pump" clock signal / trigger.

[SHADES]

What's your point? Is'nt this what I was trying to say anyway? I thni my previous points were to that not too many new computers or graphics cards use the bandwidth of 8x at this point, but towards the future, they probably will. Or are you agreeing with me now. lol

A p2 example has inferior data flow ability to that of today's memory arcitecture and a p2 is hardly up to sepc of a G4 processor. I fail to see the relevence there.
Want to see the specs on my AMIGA 500?? lol

As for the Athlon, I was mearly stating that FSB speed has increased and has improved throughput to memory and thus speeded up applications and games whatever needs shunting around ? isn't this what you have just agreed with me? the p2 is not very fast at doing that.  It would be a bottleneck here as is EDO ram to SDRAM?

I don't get it.

 Athlon 64 FX has a dual-channel memory interface as well as 3 "HyperTransport" ports.  Or so they were called a wile ago. Terminology changes like "Hammer" as a name, now Athlon and Opteron.  or perhaps Northbridge lol

The standard Athlon 64 only has 1single channel memory interface and 1 HyperTransport port.

Nicknamed "Hammer" but now called opteron multi-processor systems includes local memory on elach CPU so that the other CPUs can access the mmory of these CPUs via the HyperTransport bus.  Whcih is great for any multi cpu enviroment ie linux dual CPU core mind you it has to be specificly compiled to use that.

Initially, only the high end vrsion of the Hammer, OR "Opteron", will be equipped with two 72-bit wide DDR SDRAM channels. This can lead to having a total of eight DIMM slots which means each processor to address 8 GB.

The dualchannel intrface of the Athlon 64 FX-51 offers a theorecticle memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s .
Mind youl, the integration of the memory controller on the die can be considered to be kind of a  limitation on flexibility, as it's not going to be expanded by a purchase of a new chipset (motherboard) to run with.

If it's still called "Northbridge" so be it. This was to move away from 4 pumping or 8x pumping FSB like Intel have done. Anything On Die is going to be faster, just less upgradable without getting a new chip. CPU

Still slinging around facts allready wel documented about doesn't cahnge the fact that a G4 still has plenty of muscle and with the right arcitecture around it to compliment what it is capable of would make it not a problem to run even the high end graphics offerings.

>>
AGP8X and AGP texture memory is use as an insurance for running future and more complex games.

When GPU’s memory has been exhausted, faster AGP bus benefits AGP texture fetching features. The benefits of AGP can be maximise when has it’s own allocated bandwidth; as in nForce2’s 128bit wide bus i.e. 64bit for CPU and rest for AGP/IGP/APU/’etc’ consumption.
AGP

That's entirly my point.  If there is a bigger or faster route to memory for getting textures etc then the GPU will be able to process info faster, it's not left to the CPU. Fast Writes in AGP designed by Nvidia try to allow direct access to memory to be able to do just that. Directly access memory for textures etc.. No matter if it's a G4 or P3 or whatever flavour, so long as its supported.
AGP3.0 is trying to impliment changes as to not starve the  the graphics crads of thrughput to memory and gpus designed to remove CPU intervention and processing.
You know Grapics chips for graphics, sound for sound etc..
G4 for g4 lol

Ok, enough.

[SHADES]

>>
The importance of AGP8X is greater in the mainstream/ GPU solutions** i.e.
1. nVidia's IGP (e.g. the integrated Geforce 4 MX 420 in nForce2 chipset; uses 128bit shared memory architecture).
2. Limited onboard graphic memory e.g Geforce 4 TI 4200 64MB.

**For fleet OEM PCs.

What's that got to do with anything?? I never said AGP 8x wasn't of importance, I even gave links to info on it LOL

>>
I don’t agree with "no FSB" statements.

You don't have to, thats fine. All I said was that speed improvement to HW of this nature has impacted on bandwidth, hence speed in a major way.  You want to call it a FSB, go for it. I like memory controller. But whtever.


>>Slightly off topic, with K8, memory controller is upgraded with the CPU.

err.....didn't I just say that? ;-)

>>ASUS nForce3 150 (Socket 940**) supports PC3200 registered ECC RAM via Athlon FX 51. Note that Opteron 146 also supports PC3200 registered ECC RAM.

So??? My Asus kt133 supports IDE raid.
Error Correction Circutry <- great in servers for redundancy, a bit slower, but not too important in this discussion.

>>AMD has stated that motherboard vendors can turn off the on-die memory controller and go for the traditional CPU <> External Northbridge <> Southbridge relationship.

From my personal experience, I have upgraded CPUs more than motherboards i.e. I have unused Athlon Tbird @1.4Ghz**.

Me too, but it's not important. You can have as many memory contollers as you like in the chain, why would you bother?? On die is always going to be quicker and you can't graft more bus lines to a chip once its made, but yes, of course you can. Why would you make it incompatible with current offereings. That's not market smart.

To re design North bridge chips without controller etc and how the communicate with the rest of the moterboards would take lots of resources, designing and testing.  What they have done by saying this is that manufacturers will not need to allocate heaps of r&d re-inventing their chip designes just to run with these new CPUs AMD is offering.

>>The PowerMac G4 @1.4Ghz with ATI 9x00 VPU will show you the results of such a setup since it's the closest to the ideal A1XE G4 @1.0Ghz with ATI 9x00 VPU.

Apple are wll known for doing things "their way"
I would like to see another offereing with standard VIA or Nforce like chipset with an AGP3.0 spec.
What's the spec on that PC with regards to chipset and AGP offereing.

My old Pentium 233 has an ATI radion 8500 in it on AGP  bus, what's the point?
What you can't design a newer chipset around a G4 CPU now? just cause AMD haven't or Nvidia doesn't mean it can't be done. What your saying that Apple got it right? how old is their mainboard? If there was a more of a market then Asus gigabyte etc would all bring out their flavours.

That doesn't make the G4 a slouch though.  The G4 is a very powerful chip and quit easily able to play on a nice fast system bus. Cramp it up on a slow PCI system with SDRAM and a slow memory controller and you will have a slower system. Man it's not rocket science.

[SHADES]

>>"Importance" was referring to "not too many new computers or graphics cards use the bandwidth of 8x at this point".
    thni my previous points were to that not too many new computers or graphics cards use the bandwidth of 8x at this point,
There are many computers that use AGP8X bandwidth due;
1. nVidia's IGP (e.g. the integrated Geforce 4 MX 420 in nForce2 chipset; uses 128bit shared memory architecture).
2. Limited onboard graphic memory e.g Geforce 4 TI 4200 64MB.

That's 1 chip manufacturer.  Read the first sentance, where does it say none? I think it says not many. It's still a very new standard. How many computers do not use 8x...........

>>   On die is always going to be quicker and you can't graft more bus lines to a chip once its made,  Is my comment to your response of   "AMD has stated that motherboard vendors can turn off the on-die memory controller and go for the traditional CPU <> External Northbridge <> Southbridg......."

>>Why would you graft more bus lines? Note that you still have a hyper-transport link @DDR1600.

Huh??? you can't graft anything! what the??? your the one who said.."AMD has stated that motherboard vendors can turn off the on-die memory controller and go for the traditional CPU <> External Northbridge <> Southbridge relationship."
I was the one that said this was so chip vendors don't need to toatly re design their chips without the memory mangement features if they wanted to do it themselves.  On die is gong to be faster that's all I replied with and gave my reasons as such..

>>
Usually, one could re-flash the x86 gfx card’s ROM with a Mac version...

Yeah.. cause that's going to change all the hardware too ..

nevermind.. this is trolling and useless . C ya.