Kyro II and "AGP texturing"

[Dominique]

Many people noticed that in the window of
the DirectX diagnostic tool, "AGP texturing" appears grayed.

Is this related to the chipset of the mother board ?

Which is the chipset of those who noted this fact (it is perhaps not a problem) ?

(the Hercules support is not too sure. It made me the astonishing answer: "This might come from directX and will be corrected in its next version.")

[K6-III]

Which version of directx are you running??? Make sure not to run DirectX8.0 with the Kyro series as it really messes things up (microsoft's fault). Directx 8.1 should correct things. Until then, stick with DirectX 7.0a.

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Gimme my TriLevel Cache

[JollyRoger]

thoe problems which are not in some way microsofts fault could be counted on the fingers of one hand

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AHHH, I think my computer's got a Virus!

Oh no, that's Windows 98

[Moraelin]

It should also be noted that no card this side of i740 actually uses "AGP Texturing" any more.

The idea behind "AGP Texturing" was to allow cheap cards with 4MB RAM to do 3D by using textures directly from the PC's computer, requesting and receiving the texels over the AGP bus. If you want to know how well that idea worked, see some benchmarks of an intel board with integrated video decelerator.

In the meantime, graphics cards started having 128 bit DDR memory busses on card, at 166MHz and above. Your average Pentium 3 system has 64 bit SDR at 133 MHz. I.e., about a fifth as much memory bandwidth. And you'll likely only get half of that, since the CPU is trying to use that memory as well.

So what just about everyone does today is swap textures in and out, as needed, and then texture from video RAM.

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Moraelin -- the proud member of the Idiots' Guild

[This message has been edited by Moraelin (edited 06-22-2001).]

[Gomez Addams]

It should also be noted that no card this side of i740 actually uses "AGP Texturing" any more.

I don't believe this is correct. The AGP aperture parameter in the BIOS is used to set how much system memory can be used for AGP transfers which is primarily texture data. There are many instances where this can have a large effect on performance in games. One other interesting case is 3DMark2000. It has a large texture test that is directly affected by the aperture size. I found that once I set mine to 128M then I could run the 64M texture test. What I am getting at is that if AGP texturing was not used then why would the aperture size matter at all ?

To the best of my knowledge, Nvidia chipset cards do use AGP texturing, 3dfx cards do not, and I don't know about Kyro or Radeon cards but I would suspect that they do.



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Friends don't let friends buy P4s.

[K6-III]

Seeing as the KyroII has 64mb of memory, I doubt that it would be a problem.

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Gimme my TriLevel Cache

[Gomez Addams]

FWIW, I was running 3DMark2000 on a card with 32M. I haven't tried it on my card with 64M yet.


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Friends don't let friends buy P4s.

[Moraelin]

Oh, it uses that piece of memory all right, but that's to swap the textures to and from the card's internal memory.

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Moraelin -- the proud member of the Idiots' Guild

[Gomez Addams]

That is the very definition of AGP texturing.


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Friends don't let friends buy P4s.