Mac gebruikers zullen binnenkort ook kennis kunnen maken met het fenomeen AGP. De nieuwe Apple G4 Sawtooth moederplank zal namelijk met zo'n poort worden uitgerust, zo lezen we bij MacOS Rumors:
We've seen what a difference the G4's Altivec unit can make for 3D gaming
on the Mac. Nearly as important to the everyday Quake III: Arena addict -- and
the graphics professional, in 2D as well as 3D -- will be Sawtooth's other
remarkable feature, the AGP graphics bus-based RAGE 128 PRO.
At the end of a trio of 64-bit PCI slots -- familiar to any Yosemite user -- sits a
shorter brown slot. In it lies a prototype ATI RAGE 128 PRO graphics card, with
similar muscle to today's Rev. B Yosemites, but sporting more SGRAM and
more than twice the bus bandwidth.
To explore the advantages this 133MHz 2X AGP bus offers, we played both a
developmental and forthcoming OpenGL-based 3D space combat game
(nameless at the developer's request)....and rendered several new scenes for
the game's movie sequences. The game was Altivec-enabled; the rendering
software was not.
Head-to-head with a Yosemite (500MHz G3, Firewire RAID, 384MB of RAM),
the Sawtooth (550MHz G4, UltraDMA/66, 384MB of RAM) bested it by 35
frames per second, and during heavy-action sequences with large ships
moving nearby and many fighters in the fray offered far superior texture quality
(the game reduces textures to maintain speed) and nearly a 60 FPS lead. The
game itself was still unoptimized, and the developers believe once they prepare
for the G4's superior FPU, they will be able to increase the performance of any
G4 Mac by another 10-15%. They also believed there was more room for
Altivec optimization if they found the time to devote to it.
[break] Ze hebben ook nog een filmpje lopen renderen en de performance vergeleken met een dual PIII-500. Uiteraard was de Mac sneller... [/break]
The same pair of machines, along with a dual 500MHz Pentium III computer
machine running Windows NT, ran head-to-head renderings of a five-minute
computer-generated video sequence from the game at a resolution of
1280x1024 pixels. The Pentium III had a 100MHz motherboard, a RAGE Orion
32MB graphics card in its 2X AGP slot, 512MB of SDRAM, and a four-drive
Ultra2 SCSI RAID.
The results were surprising, even considering how much we'd already been
raving about the Sawtooth's performance. The Pentium III and the Yosemite
were close, with the Yose only winning by about two minutes (30:42 vs. 32:47).
The Sawtooth, however, even though the rendering software did not directly
support Altivec, finished at 26.03 -- nearly seven minutes minutes before the
Pentium, which had 128MB more RAM and a significantly faster drive array.
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