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Author Topic: ATI Radeon (and others) comparison  (Read 7259 times)

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Offline Cymric

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Re: ATI Radeon (and others) comparison
« on: October 29, 2003, 09:30:56 PM »
Besides, the CPUs in the AmigaOne have too little muscle to supply a modern high-performance video card with sufficient data in a given time frame. In other words: the CPU is likely going to hold the video card back, performance wise. Since you can get quite good deals on older Radea, my suggestion would be to shop wisely ;-).
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Offline Cymric

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Re: ATI Radeon (and others) comparison
« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2003, 11:01:08 AM »
Permit me to refer you all to this link which gives you some idea of what I had in mind. Two remarks: a G4 is not an Athlon 1000, but certainly not an Athlon XP2700+, and there are cases where it really doesn't make much of a difference what CPU you have. Also, you have to realise that a lower performance does not automatically mean 'unusable', 'unworkable' or 'unplayable'. My statement was: the CPU is preventing the card from running at full throttle.

Looking back at the data, I realise I may have to withdraw that statement as the memory bandwidth is much larger in case of the faster Athlon. So to lay the blame entirely at the feet of the CPU is probably not supported by the data, even though the article does not mention it. However, something is holding the card back for sure. Since the AmigaOne does not have the bandwidth of the faster test system, I will uphold my opinion it is not necessary (nor financially wise) to plug in the fastest Radeon, especially since it will take a good while before games appear which tax the hardware to its limits.

On a side note, good developers will strive to minimize AGP traffic once the program is running, and utilise every last byte of fast RAM on the card before falling back to much slower main memory. Therefore AGP 8x (or even 16x) doesn't mean an awful lot if the only intensive traffic across the bus is during the initialisation stage. AGP 8x and 16x are marketing tricks.
Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.