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8x AGP for Dual Processing Systems? 32

Posted by Cliff from the avoiding-the-bottleneck dept.
Paul E. Loeb asks: "I am wondering if there are any solutions out there that will allow the use of an 8x AGP bus with dual processing support. I prefer AMD Athlon MP, but Xeon would be fine as well. I am looking to build a high-end graphics and video editing system, and I don't want to submit to a single Intel or AMD processor. I do however wish to use a Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX, but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus. Thank you in advance for all of your advice."
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8x AGP for Dual Processing Systems? More

8x AGP for Dual Processing Systems?

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  • 4x is fine (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    high-end graphics and video editing system

    Honestly, I don't see why you would need a 8x AGP card. Nothing except 3D games take advantage of it. I'd stick to a fast, single CPU system if you insist on 8X agp. Right now the dual chipsets are flakey.
    • Let's not forget about 3D content creation.
      • Disclaimer: I have absolutely no real experience in the video or graphics industry.

        That being said, 3D content creation wouldn't be limited to the card would it?

        In the case of raytracing, modeling 3D animation like Pixar, or other similar work...isn't that processor bound? They do everything in memory, then output a single 2d frame. Then repeat for the next frame. Once all the frames have been rendered, then they add them together to make the movie.

        For video editing...that would always be in 2D.

        Wouldn't the only thing that a 3D card be useful for is real time displaying of 3D enviroments?
    • CAD, 3D modeling, rendering.. all NEED 3D accel..

  • 8X is a marketing feature (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @03:42AM (#5209081)
    I do however wish to use a Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX, but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus

    Not according to most benchmarks I've seen. The AGP speed mainly comes into play when the VRAM can't hold all the textures, and the card has to go to main memory. When that happens, performance will suck no matter the AGP speed, but that should be very rare with the 128MB either of those cards would pack. 8x makes a negligible difference in benchmarks of current PC games. In other words, don't make AGP 8x a sticking point in a system that meets all your other needs.

    • Re:8X is a marketing feature (Score:5, Informative)

      by spongman ( 182339 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:17AM (#5209241)
      This is definitely the case for most applications where 128MB easily covers the texture requirements and the only speedup seen is for vertex/instruction buffers. However he specifically states that he's doing high-end graphics and video editing, in which case it's quite reasonable that the increase in bandwidth that 8x provides could significantly improve performance. Remember: games are specifically tuned so that most of the textures remain on the card for significant amounts of time. For example, they design the levels so that at any given position all of the textures necessary to render the surrounding environment and any additional features (characters, weapons, effects, overlays, etc...) will fit in VRAM. However, if you're using a 3d modelling package to create arbitrarily complex environments you can quite easily exceed the VRAM on your card for a single render. At this point bandwith is key, and it is these kinds of situations where specifically-designed graphics workstations (eg. SGI) mop the floor with your $400 games cards.
      • At this point bandwith is key, and it is these kinds of situations where specifically-designed graphics workstations (eg. SGI) mop the floor with your $400 games cards.


        Surprisingly enough, this is not as true as it used to be, according to this super interesting paper [uni-erlangen.de]. Basically, they found that a plain old Athlon with a GeForce3 performed and looked better than a $100k SGI, in some cases, by huge margins.

        (Granted, the paper concerns realtime volumetric rendering of medical imaging (i.e. turning 2D brain scans into 3D models), and not video editing or traditional 3D modeling, but in either case, bandwidth is the key limiting factor.)
        • I had to write an in-house report on the history of graphics accelerators. From what I've researched so far, the video bus seems to double every 24 months, while the GPU doubles every 12 months, and the CPU speed doubles every 18 months (Moore's law). Here's a table of bus speeds I drew up: Year introduced Bus type Bus data width (Bits) Transfers per bus clock cycle Bus speed (MHz) Data transfer rate (megabytes/second) 1981 PC/XT 8 1 4.77 - 8.3 3.25/7.90 1985 ISA 16 1 8.3 6.50/15.9 1988 EISA 32 1 8.3 31.80 1987 MCA 32 1 8.3 20.00 1991 VL-BUS 32 1 33 to 50 127.2/132.00 1992 PCI 32 1 33 127.2/132.00 1995 PCI 2.1 64 1 66.67 508.60 1996 AGP x1 32 1 66.67 254.30/266.00 1998 AGP x2 32 2 66.67 508.60/533.00 1999 PCI-X 1.0 64 1 133.33 1017.30 2000 AGP x4 32 4 266.67 1017.30 2002 PCI-X 2.0 64 2 (DDR) 266.66 2100.00 2002 AGP x8 32 8(ODR) 533.33 2100.00 2002 PCI-X 2.0 64 4 (QDR) 533.33 4300.00 2003 PCI-X 3.0 64 8(ODR) 1066.66 8500.00 2003 HyperTransport 32 2 (DDR) 800.00 16000.00 The speed increases aren't just marketing. The video bus has to keep being faster than the needs of the graphics card, otherwise board makers will start designing custom bus solutions to solve the bandwidth problem. However, I don't understand why AGP x8 has been made incompatible with AGP x2. The only reason seems to be to force people to dump perfectly good PC motherboards.

  • Why?? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hawkbug ( 94280 ) <psx@fWELTYimble.com minus author> on Sunday February 02, 2003 @03:44AM (#5209084) Homepage
    Do you have some special requirement for AGP 8X? From every review I have ever read (and that's a lot), AGP 8X is simply a marketing thing. Nvidia and ATI hyped it all up, but the performance on the current GPU chipsets doesn't even require it yet, or even come close for that matter. You might be talking a 3% performance boost in some cases, so you're wasting your time trying to find a board with this requirement at this point in time. If I were you, I'd be more worried about finding a dual AMD solution with a 333 FSB, now THAT would get you some serious performance increases - running DDR 333 synchronously with an Athlon MP @333!
    • He mentioned that he was submitting this, which means it's probably a contract proposal. In that case, he very well may need the 8x to show that he is as buzzword compliant as the next guy.
      • He mentioned that he was submitting this, which means it's probably a contract proposal.

        No, he said "and I don't want to submit to a single Intel or AMD processor"...

        I read this is saying he doesn't want to be at the mercy of a single processor, and e.g. drop a frame when he is editing video
    • You are forgetting the intended purpose of his machine. It isn't to play games! I'll bet every one of your "benchmarks" and reviews compares an 8x AGP card to a 4x AGP card using current "applications" - most likely games. He is creating content which will certainly involve textures beyond the 128MB of current high end gaming cards, which means the graphics chip will be accessing main memory a lot. 8x will provide a significant speedup. Remember, most games are tuned to fit all their textures within texture memory on the card, so the speed of the AGP bus is hardly significant.
  • By all accounts, development of SMP motherboards for Athlon has all but stopped pending the release of the next generation of Athlon MP ("Barton") [amd.com].

    This is largely due to the fact that as of late last year, Intel multiprocessing solutions have become cheaper than their AMD counterparts. Intel has reduced lower-end Xeon pricing as faster Xeons have come out. AMD has not done the same with Athlon MP prices. And so Tyan, MSI, Asus et al. are not spending much time thinking about how to keep their Athlon MP motherboard line up to date.

    This is just a guess, but it might also have something to do with some bad blood between AMD and manufacturers: the most recent AMD chipset for dual Athlon MP's (760MPX-based) had a bug in the Southbridge that completely disabled on-board USB 1.1 (oops) and it took AMD a while to get a fix into production motherboards. That probably didn't earn them big points.

  • Instead of AGP 8X... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ihtagik ( 318795 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @04:35AM (#5209187)
    why not get a "heavyweight" gfx card like the new Nvidia Quadro FX 1/2000 card. It will provide you with the necessary throuput to handle some serious 3D work, movie editing and give you a year or so of obsolescency protection.

    Or better yet get one of these babies [boxxtech.com]!
  • Take a look at dual Xeon motherboards that have the Intel E7505 [intel.com] chipset, which provides support for AGP 8X along with dual-channel DDR SDRAM. The i860 chipset (which uses dual channel Rambus) will only allow up to AGP 4X. Supermicro and Tyan have motherboards available using the E7505 chipset.

    Right now, you will not see much, if any, difference in performance between AGP 4X and AGP 8X...

    • Re:Newer Dual Xeon's have AGP 8X (Score:4, Insightful)

      by spongman ( 182339 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:30AM (#5209263)
      unfortunately the 7505s only support DDR266 which is only just sufficient to supply the 533MHz FSB CPUs. When you add the 2.1GB/s requirement of the AGP8x port on top of that you start biting into your efficiency. let's hope they come out with a 333/400 solution soon.

      also, is it me or is anyone else pissed that since the introduction of the P4 intel has stopped dualie support on their desktop line? i still have fond memories of my dual-hacked-celeron/300a++ setup. anyone remember the 440BX? damn that thing lasted for years, now we seem to get a new chipset every few months...

      speaking of which, what's up with AMD & their dual proc story. is just one MP chipset in 2 years enough? i think not...

      • The reason for them using dual channel PC2100 (aka DDR266) instead of faster DDR SDRAM is to keep the CPU front side bus and the memory bus as synchronized as possible (4.2GB vs. 4.2GB). Running the memory bus out of sync from the FSB may end up causing additional latency as well as the fact that the CPUs can only saturate up to 4.2GB/s (since Xeons use a shared bus instead of the point-to-point bus used by the Athlons).

        The problem with the current Athlons is the fact that both processors get the full FSB bandwidth, but are limited by a single-channel DDR memory controller. That should change with the Athlon 64/Opteron processors... but that's still a bit down the road.
  • Radeon 9700 (NON pro) $225
    Reflash BIOS and OC it to 337Core and 310RAM, that's a little better than a 9700 pro stock.

    IWILL Athalon MPX Board, throw a fan on the northbridge and it OCd to 147(294DDR) FSB

    Get 2 Athalon 2400s With the FSB OC you're running them at 2.2 GHz each. Get some conductive paint and connect the L5 bridge to turn them into athalon MPs.

    2x512MB Cas2 Registered RAM

    stress test, stress test, stress test. Mine is happy and stable at these speeds. YMMV!

    I'm very happy with this setup and it didn't cost a fortune either.

    A UV Blacklight, 2 Glowing CPU fans, and 4 UV sensitive IDE cables with a case window round it all out nicely.

    Relax, and encode a Divx movie in under 2 hrs:)
  • buy some proper video editing equipment [dps.com]

    better money spent than in your fancy smancy gfx card

    for under $1000 you can get full broadcast quality non-linear editing with full resulution capture

    and you can use a $10 Trident 8900C VGA card

    Mine's over 10 years old and will work just fine on my Pentium 90. If you want to add effects then a bit moor oomph wouldn't go amiss.

  • Serious graphics vs. Gamer / Gamer-like graphics (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zeio ( 325157 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @03:43PM (#5211182)
    How can you make this statement: "but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus." (note: you probably you meant ON, not at)

    Look, if you want an SMP gaming box, this question should be automatically relegated to /dev/null, however, if you are seriously looking for a graphics workstation and thing AGP 8x is the bus to lust for, think again.

    I've had the pleasure of using high end Sun and SGI workstations here and there. While they may not have the fill rate of their gaming friends, they have many, many "work smart, not hard" accelerations available to them that matter in the professional circuit. I would think that any serious graphics capabilities would be best served by an SGI box, and believe me, they don't get AGP So, if you are into MCAD/MCAE, Digital Mockup (DMU) , 3D Animation, Medical Imaging, Scientific Visualization, Oil and Gas (seismic interpretation), Visual Simulation, Editing and Compositing and Geospatial Imaging, you probably aren't the type to need to ask Slashdot where to buy a PC for any of these applications, many of which don't even run on PC architecture. It was a very recent thing where PC cards could even be competitive with professional cards in terms of brute forcing past the elegant hardware accelerations available to professional cards. No one with a professional 3d card on a real workstation feels bad because their metrics don't include Mad Onion/Future Mark 3DMark 2009 XP White Zinfandel Platinum Edition Build 1048576.

    You need a dual gaming-only box Why? Why? Just get a single p4-3.06 HT and a Radeon 9700. Believe my, even if it doesn't have AGP 8x, its going to make no more than 5% difference. And who the hell cares about 5% when frame rates are coming out at two times the monitors refresh rate? Who cares?

    If you are not a pure gamer, but do other things that fit the gamer archetype like ripping DIVX, then you probably want a fast integer rig for consumer operating systems like Windows XP, then get a Dual 2.8GHz Xeon with an ATI or Nvidia or even a Matrox Parhelia (a popular "professional" card due to 3 heads). Most of the professional PC cards require AGP Pro 110, so that's the slot you would be looking for, Pro 110 is a far more important consideration than AGP 8x. (110 being the watts that the slot can dish out).

    I think this is a consumer grade Photoshop / Premiere / Lightwave / Bryce / QuickTime / DiVX / MPEG box. That is the "gamer" category as far as I'm concerned, and for any of those applications, AGP 8x makes no difference.

    Don't be looking for Raytheon to start using junk PCs in simulations for any of the military grade stuff they design, it just isn't happening. Microsoft = consumer grade, Nvidia = consumer grade. Just because the really high end stuff is priced beyond the reach of consumers doesn't mean its junk.

  • agp 8x mainboard... (Score:3, Informative)

    by joelja ( 94959 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @03:46PM (#5211204)
    currently your only choice that meets both of your criterion (agp 8x and dual cpu support) is the intel 37505 chipset. that meens of course you'll be shopping for socket 603 xeons...

    I would expect in most application benchmarks you'll see the difference in benchmarks of agp 4x and 8x being vanishingly close to zero at this time but yuor mileage may vary, especially if you're a doom3 developer... ;)

    Anyway supermicro makes such a board, the super X5DAL-TG which also has serial ata and gigabit ethernet so it's probably a niceish board even if it's outside my price range...

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