Diamond Multimedia: AGP for Games Enthusiasts

AGP for Games Enthusiasts

Since Microsoft developed DirectX for Windows 95 and helped to make the PC the premier gaming platform on the market, game developers have been consistently pushing the boundaries of what is possible with today's technology. AGP removes one of the main bottlenecks in the system for games, the graphics pipeline.

AGP has a number of features that make it ideally suited to improve the performance and quality of real-time 3D games:

Speed of transfer: The PCI bus works at a peak bandwidth of 33 MHz, but AGP works at 66 MHz. That means that PCI can transfer data at a peak rate of 133 Mbytes/s, but AGP starts off at 266 Mbytes/s and goes up to 512 Mbytes/s in 2X mode, and will eventually reach over 1 Gigabyte/s with AGP 4X in 1999. The result is that the CPU can hand off graphics information to the AGP graphics card at much better rates than PCI, removing one of the obstacles to better 3D performance.
More textures: AGP is designed to directly connect the graphics board to the CPU and system memory. Not only does the graphics card get 3D information quicker, it can access main memory as if it was local, on-board memory. This creates two benefits. First, more textures can be stored in system memory improving the quality of 3D games. You will also save on the cost of having extra local memory on your graphics card to have the richest 3D environments.

Diamond's AGP Solutions for Games Enthusiasts
(Detailed Product Information)

Diamond's Viper V330 AGP graphics board, based on true 128-bit technology from NVIDIA, is designed for the ultimate gaming platform. It supports Direct Memory Execute (DME) and Direct Memory Access (DMA). These are two methods for retrieving large stores of texture information from system memory. In DME, the texture information is retrieved and processed directly before it lands on the screen. In DMA bitmaps or textures are stored in system or AGP memory and transferred to the local, on-board memory of the Viper V330. The processing is done locally, and the speed of transfer in local memory can sometimes be better than with DME accesses. With the Viper V330 you get the best performance depending on how a developer has implemented AGP textures.

It all adds up to the fastest frame rates and the best 3D graphics images in games and business.

Games Enhanced for AGP

Tonic Trouble was specifically designed for AGP technology from the onset of development in order to have more texture memory, without being limited to the on-board graphics memory. Tonic Trouble takes advantage of AGP's additional bandwidth to use many more polygons, resulting in rich textures. The final outcome is better definition featuring crisp, super-fluid animation, rapid renderings and the ability to have more characters on the screen simultaneously.

Incoming has been designed from the outset to fully harness the emerging technologies of Pentium II and AGP. AGP opens the floodgates on the texture bottleneck of the PCI card, using system memory for textures, which gives you extra texture memory virtually for free. This allows for the allocation of more textures of larger size and all in resplendent 64k colors.