Motherboads, and Graphics standards set to change

[manitoubalck]

BTX will replace the 7 or so year old ATX form Factor, and with that change comes a new Graphics standard. x16 PCI Express will replace the current standard AGP. The following paragraph is from “www.anandtech.com” about the new motherboard layout, and standards. These changes are set to take place during 2004

"Graphics in BTX

The vast majority of BTX form factors will see PCI Express based graphics as the choice of video card in these systems. ATI has already announced that they will be releasing a native PCI Express video card once the standard becomes available in platforms. Although you can have multiple widths of PCI Express buses, graphics will use a x16 PCI Express implementation that offers 8GB/s of bandwidth."

This increase in bandwidth from 2.1GB/s to 8GB/s, will no doubt aid graphic intensive tasks like games and image rendering.
Will Apple follow suit or stick with the AGP bus?

One thing that stands out above all else though is that the layout closely resembles that of the single processor G5 boards, especially with the heat sink design. And the strong focus on quiet coolong

A final word
“It will take quite a while before the death of ATX; and although we've done a lot to get rid of the "beige box"… the final nail in the coffin of boring computers will be driven by BTX.”

 

[MacBandit]

What use is 8.1GB/s when even the ATI9800 barely pushes the 1066MB/s of 4x AGP?

 

[FuzzyBallz]

Man, you're just pulling data out of the thin air aren't you? Where did you get the Radeon 9800 running barely AGP 4x part?

And how do you know ATI and nVidia don't already have a prototype 16x PCI-Express card?

However, all these hype brought up by anandtech sounds nice, but I don't think I'll be throwing away my money any time soon. Not until the BTX format becomes main stream or matures, say in 2 - 3 years? Mean while, back to my dual G4 MDD 1.25 and Barton 2.2 systems.

 

[MacBandit]

I'm quite aware of ATI and NVidia both adopting the PCI Express format. If you want to know about the data throuput needs of cards such as the ATI9800 and the Geforce FX you can check at anatech.com or tomshardware.com. They have stated many times when talking about 8x AGP that not even the fastest cards ever fully saturate a 4x AGP bus. They do max it out but not very often and usually only briefly.

 

[MacBandit]

Okay so I've done some research about the current state of affairs on AGP 2.0 and 3.0 there factor in overall frame rates. As it turns out it is starting to become a factor though a small one. The deal is that since there has been and is future bus standard that truly gives the throughput needed to supply the high end video cards manufacturers have chosen to put large amounts of memory on there video cards. What this does is allow the video card to pre-buffer all the textures needed and for the most part the AGP bus is not used at all in normal game play. This is because with the current game textures are still small enough they can still fit in memory. From what I read if there was a bus format that came along with speeds reaching that of on board memory then card manufacturers could start using more system memory. Also it would require video game developers to rewrite their games to take advantage of the higher bus speed and not the on board memory as much. So all in all yes faster bus speed will be advantageous it isn't the end all to graphics performance. It appears that video ram is pretty much here to stay and that even when higher bus speeds become available with the price of ram dropping they will stick to on board ram because it will always be easier to tune a card to work with a known speed of ram and have it on board rather then accessing system memory.


Here's a couple links that explaining the whole situation.

http://www.cpuplanet.com/features/article.php/30231_2117941_3

http://www.ocaddiction.com/articles/video/agp8x/

 

[MacsRgr8]

Tnx for the info MacBandit.
Interesting stuff.