AGP 8X... is it needed?

[Humus]

Rags:
Texture compression does not solve the problem of getting vertex transfers faster. With T&L coming into games a lot of vertex transfers has to be pushed over the bus.

[Rags]

No, but vertex transfers are only using AGP 4X speed if it's using "Fast writes" mode AFAIK.

Rags

[Wombat]

When is 8x supposed to be out anyway? It will be needed eventually.

"640k ought to be enough for anybody".....

It's good they're looking ahead. It takes years to develop new standards.

[superfly]

Agp 8x will only be usefull for transfering data to the video card,it won't be of much help to use it as a way to access textures that won't fit on your video cards memory limit.

The reason for this is that even with 2 gig's of bandwith available(agp 8x),the memory bandwith available on existing video cards alredy exceeds 6 gigs/sec(Gf2 and Gf2 ultra).

By the time Agp 8x is released(maybe a year from now),we should see video cards that exceed 10 gigs second.

As far as textures go,there will never be a fast enough solution to access textures in system memory,when compared to the bandwith available on video cards.

I have to problem in believing that we'll see 128mb video cards within a year costing no more than today's high end cards do.

Texture compression does help a lot,but it's something developers have to code for.