Effy wrote:
I have got a Voodoo4 PCI card that I got from Ebay, but now I only need a Mediator to fit it in. The fun thing about using a Voodoo4 with 32 Mb is that this memory on the card is also used as system memory and therefor works at turbospeed compared to the somewhat slower EDO memory modules that the system usually works with. At least, that's what I have read on the Elbox site ...
That's not quite true IIRC. It does indeed use the memory on the voodoo but only as buffering for transfers between other devices on the PCI bus.
This does indeed speed up certian transfers between cards considerably rather than going the 'long way round' (ie through system memory). Pretty clever trick all said :-)
However, transfers from the system to from the gfx card will still be limited by the rate at which the CPU can communicate through the Mediator (or G-Rex).
Some tests I got a bunch of users here to run a while ago showed that this is still under 10M/s for most Mediator systems and thats for quad longword aligned access (ie best case).
So the memory on the Voodoo isn't used for any program code or the like AFAIK...
