agp speed among other things...

[CodeSmith]

ple3003 wrote:
I recently made two benchmarks usind 3dMark on a duron 600, 256mb pc133 and ATI Radeon 8500. One with agp 4x enabled, and one with agp 4x disabled - guess that means 2x or 1x. Apparently it made no diffrence, cause i scored 4100 both times. That is good, as the A1 only use agp 1x. Not as good as my old XP1600+, with 512mb ddr266 together with that ATI Radeon of mine. Scored 9000 back then. guess that the CPU speed and/or memory speed. Certainly hope it wasn't the ddr though, cause the A1 is equipped with sdr. what do you think about this? Is the A1 mobo going to utilize all that power of the ATI Radeon 8500 to it's full potential?

Nothing uses AGPx1 any more - not even the AmigaOne (AGPx2).  When you disabled AGPx4, you set the AGP bus to AGPx2.  The reason you didn't see any difference is because AGP speed only makes a real difference for either huge scenes with millions of polygons, or textures that are too big to fit in the graphics card's internal RAM.  The nice thing about AGP is that if you run out of GFX RAM, you can use some of your main memory, but that's so slow compared to VRAM that the speed of the bus makes little difference.  The fact that the board has DDR and the mobo SDR does not impact anything, since the two sets of memory only communicate through the AGP bus (that's why you can use the same gfx card regardless of whether you have SDR, DDR, RAMBUS, whatever...)

[CodeSmith]

3DMark is mostly meant to measure how good your PC is for playing 3D games (it's made by Remedy, a games company and ex-demo crew), so the speed of your CPU will affect scores.  Most of my current CPU knowledge comes from the PC world, unfortunately (back when I last looked at these things on the Amiga, a 68040 was the high end), so I can't tell you how this maps to PCs.  I've heard claims that an 2x MHz P3 = x MHz G4.  I suspect it's a bit less than that, but I'd be surprised if a G4 were slower than a P4 running at the same clock speed.  It's hard to compare the two because Motorola goes for lots of shallow pipelines, whereas Intel likes using just a few very deep ones.  I guess the only reliable benchmark in such a case would be to compare the same (modern) program on x86 and Mac, for example Quake3 framerates for x86 vs Mac would be a good reference (is there Quake3 for the mac?)