🚀 go-pugleaf

On 21 Nov 1999 17:11:48 -0500, Salim Qadri <sqadri@nortel.xx> wrote:
>Daniel Chee <cchee2@bigred.unl.edu> writes:
>> The V4 does do Multitexturing although it's done in a shit ass
>> way. 
>
>Umm. It has 2 full texture units per VSA-100. Thats like the TNT2.

	Though not like the GeForce or S3 Savage 2000, which can both
handle 4 textures at a time in a single chip.

>You are obviously an idiot. See other posts to see how the Voodoo4
>uses texture memory efficiently even while duplication is
>unfortunately necessary for higher memory bandwidth. 

	It uses memory efficiently while duplicating everything?  Is
it just me or does that not make much sense.  I get the concept that
they're going for, that each chip get's it's own 128-bit, 166MHz or
whatever memory pipeline, but it doesn't seem overly efficient to me.
I'd much rather just see half as much memory but using DDR memory (to
double the bandwidth).  Seems as though that would be a more effective
and cost efficient idea to me.

>Also, each VSA chip gets its own 32 MB of texture/framebuffer space
>except for the V5 5000 board. This is as much memory as any other
>gamer board available (more in effect because of framebuffer size
>getting smaller as you add more chips).

	32MB is the norm now, but it's quickly looking like 64MB per
chip will be fairly common when the V4/V5 are finally released in 5
months time.  Both the GeForce256 and S3 Savage 2000 support 64MB of
memory.  Heck, even the SiS 300 video chipset supports that much
memory.

>There are 2 texture and 2 pixel pipelines per VSA-100. 2 VSA-100's
>give you 4 texture/pixel pipelines per board. I am not sure why the
>increase from 9 to 14 million when all they added was:
>- 1 pixel pipeline
>- enhanced texture pipeline
>- 32 bit rendering
>- 32 MB support
>- 2048x2048 textures
>- 32 bit texture support

	It's about time they added these last 4 features.  These are
all features that the last 2 generations of 3D accelerators have all
had except for 3dfx products.

>- AGP 4x + sidebanding

	Nice that it's finally supported though it isn't a very useful
feature.  I am, however, sceptical as to how this will work in the V5
cards with more then one processor.  From what I'm hearing, these
cards have an AGP to PCI bridge on board to allow for the multiple
graphics processors to work together.  It might still work, but I
wouldn't be holding my breath for AGP texturing support.  Still, as I
said, not exactly something I'd be too worried about.

>- caches? (this is possibly the biggest reason for the transistor
>  count increase but I'm just speculating)

	Possibly, I haven't seen how much cache these chips have.  I
doubt that it's changed too dramatically though.

>- asynchronous core/memory clocks? (speculation)

	Didn't the V3 have seperate clocks for it's core and memory as
well?  Either way, this isn't going to change things much.  The clock
most likely aren't even part of the VSA-100 chips anyway,but rather
seperate clock chips.

Anthony Hill
hilla@uoguelph.ca