Diamond Multimedia: AGP for Professional 3D Graphics

AGP for Professional 3D Graphics

AGP is what the professional 3D graphics user has been waiting for. It is the technology that takes the PC into the graphics workstation territory by offering a dedicated graphics bus.

All of the features of AGP can be used in conjunction with a professional 3D graphics board to create what Intel calls balanced computing. Balanced computing occurs when the CPU is working at its peak rate, shuffling information between its caches and memory, and the graphics board is also working at peak rate accessing data in system memory at high speeds simultaneously.
(Images: Lobby Image - rendered using Lightscape, Car Image - created by Frank Rivera using trueSpace by Caligari)

There are a number of features of AGP that make balanced computing possible:

Pipelining - Commands from the graphics board to the system memory are queued up and therefore, all of the available bandwidth on AGP is used.

Dual Independent Bus (DIB) - The way 3D graphics works is, the CPU performs some calculations and transformations on a 3D model and hands off the data to the graphics bus to turn into a 2D representation of a 3D model on the computing screen (a process called rasterization). In Pentium II and AGP systems the CPU has a dual independent bus (DIB) architecture which provides it with two distinct accesses to its L2 cache, and to system memory. This is separate from the Accelerated Graphics Port for the graphics. Thus, the CPU is caching data and processing data to system memory independently, which is itself a performance advantage. At the same time, the graphics board can get at the CPU's processed data through AGP. This is the ideal in balanced computing, and the way a graphics workstation would do the job.

Scalability - The existence of independent, high-speed connections between the CPU, graphics board, and system memory means that applications developers can improve the functionality and performance of their software by taking more advantage of how they use all these components in conjunction with each other. It's just the beginning of where AGP graphics can take you.

For professional 3D graphics users, AGP holds much promise. It is designed to reflect the kind of architectures you would find in graphics workstations, and as such, promises much for the future. Right now there is no denying that high performance Pentium II and AGP systems are a vast improvement over traditional PC architectures, and that as applications take advantage of AGP more fully, you will start to see even greater performance increases in the years to come.

Diamond's AGP solution for professional 3D users
(Detailed Product Information)

Diamond's Fire GL 1000 Pro is optimized to take advantage of AGP in professional 3D applications. The Fire GL 1000 Pro uses offscreen memory on-board to store textures for optimum performance, but cleverly uses sideband signalling to scale with the amount of texture information the application outputs. In addition, the Fire GL 1000 Pro will also benefit from having a higher performance Pentium II feeding it 3D information over the Accelerated Graphics Port. With Diamond optimized driver technology and Permidia 2 performance, the Fire GL 1000 Pro AGP is the perfect graphics solution for high performance Pentium II workstations.