🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 28 Sep 1995, Nearly Normal Norman wrote:

> Give it six months and VRAM based graphis cards will be a thing of the
> past. the price/performance trade off isn't really worth it, compared to
> the speed boosts you can get from graphics accelerators using 128 bit
> buses and EDO DRAM.

Hi Norm,

	I think your assessment is just a tad too optimistic.  I don't
think we will be seeing 128-bit buses nor EDO RAM on graphics cards!  =)

	PCI buses are 32-bit.  The dual PCI standard to be released with 
P6s are 64-bit.  We are still a long way from 128-bit buses.  :-)  If you 
are referring to the Number Nine Imagine 128, it doesn't have an 128-bit 
bus, but rather it processes video data 128 bits at a time.  It still 
fetches data 32 bits at a time over the PCI bus.

	VRAM will still be around for a while.  Its current incarnation is
WRAM, or Window RAM, which is also dual-ported like VRAM, and is being
used on upper-end graphics cards such as the Matrox Millenia.  The
advantage of dual-ported VRAM or WRAM voer single-ported DRAM is not
apparent at lower colors such as 640x480x256 since a computer does not
need much video RAM at this resolution/color.  At such color levels and 
resolutions, an Imagine 128 would not outperform a humble w32p-based card 
noticibly (except maybe in Windows when the expanded 2D acceleration 
capabilities of the I128 would come into play).

	However, the advantage of VRAM/WRAM becomes more apparent when one
needs 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit color for stuff like 3DStudio renderings at
say, 1024x768x16.7million resolutions, where the amount/speed of the RAM
onboard the video card becomes important. 

	The improvement in graphics cards in the next six months will
neither be in bus width nor RAM on-board, but rather with the coprocessor
chips which can take massive computational loads off the CPU by handling
3D computations such as all the operations for calculating, shading, 
texture-mapping, and even video-mapping onto polygons, and for 
full-motion video acceleration such as a hardware decoder that supports 
various formats such as MPEG or AVI.

Regards and clear skies,

TRH Sends
________________________________________________________________
Thomas Russell Hong
Columbia University in the City of New York
Department of Biological Sciences
email: th...@columbia.edu
The W3 USNF Graphical Landing Tutorial on my WWW homepage:  
http://www.columbia.edu/~th34