[SunRescue] Creator 2D/PCI card in Ultra 5?

[Chris Drelich]

Errr. Well, maybe I didn't explain well.  There ARE things that go into an AGP
slots besides Graphics cards.  You don't want this.  You don't want your RAID
or Network or SCSI card depending on AGP.  So basicly your peripheral gets a
boost and your system gets a performance hit.  This is NOT how it works, but
probably the best way I can explain it: think of AGP devices has half-hardware,
half-software emulation, it does everything in hardware, but when hardware
fills up, instead of peripheral performance starting to falter, it does
software-emulation(no, it doesn't actually do this, it actually just takes away
resources of the host system based on the AGP bus architecture, but this is
just a simple analogy, ok?) and the actual computer, rather then the
peripheral, starts to do actual work, using cycles, stealing RAM, etc..  Now,
if all you do his play games, thn AGP is fine, your game isn't using all the
cycles of your new 800MHz proccessor, and you have plenty of RAM, so you don't
notice a system hit, you just see nice graphics.  However, this is a different
case in a serious server, when your RAID card begins to take away precious RAM
and cycles, and unlike a normal proccess, there's nothing you can do about it. 
So, yes, in some cases AGP is a good thing, but this is mainly for graphics in
a single user system which generally plays games.  I hope that cleared up some stuff.
Chris

David Murphy wrote:
> 
> Quoting <38D774D8.21E01F94 at interport.net>
> by Chris Drelich <hyena at interport.net>:
> 
> > > Random fact - AGP is just 66MHz PCI with some add-on bits for
> > > storing textures in host memory, etc.
> 
> > Yes, this is why AGP is generally only used for Graphics cards and
> > only by Quake kids and those who don't know better, its (hopefully)
> > never found on servers. It sucks resources from the host system.
> > Though this may make the card faster, it makes the system slower,
> > and who wants this unknown factor in a server or really any system?
> 
> Really? I'm not sure I understand how an empty AGP slot, or one with a
> largely idle graphics card sitting in text mode is more of a drain on
> a system than, say, an empty 66MHz PCI slot, but I'm happy to be clued
> in...
> 
> > So you only want AGP if you need the latest graphics rendering
> > capabilities and don't care about straing on your system(Re: you do
> > nothing but play games).
> 
> Personally, the most machine-stressfull thing I do on my workstation
> is play games 8) Real work is 99.99% typing in xterms.
> 
> --
> When asked if it is true that he uses his wheelchair as a weapon he will reply:
> "That's a malicious rumour. I'll run over anyone who repeats it."
> Stephen Hawking - [http://www.smh.com.au/news/0001/07/features/features1.html]
> David Murphy - For PGP public key, send mail with Subject: send-pgp-key
> 
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