LOSTCIRCUITS

nForce2 and AGP 8X

Both the Granite Bay and the nForce2 chipset are using what falls under the general umbrella of Dual Channel DDR, however, as we explained in our Granite Bay article, aside from the name and a total of 128 bit memory bus width, the two technologies have very little in common. The nForce2 SPP uses two independent memory controllers in crossbar configuration whereas the Granite Bay combines two banks of memory to one 128 bit wide "Überbank". The net effect is higher granularity on the nForce2 chipset vs. higher total bandwidth on the Granite Bay. In terms of functionality, the difference is that the Granite Bay can only address one bank at the time whereas the two independent controllers of the nForce2 chipset can set up independent DMA engines or else serve the CPU. For AGP that needs to contrive transfer of both geometry data from the CPU and texture data from the graphics aperture, this higher granularity could be a prerequisite for utilizing the increased bandwidth of the 8X protocol.

3DS-MAX

Aside from the "runaway" result for AGP 2X, there is a small but noticeable gain of AGP 8X over AGP4X

Drv-08

Drv-08 once again gives us the data that we would have liked to see throughout all benches with more than 3.6 % performance increase of AGP 8X compared to AGP 4X.

DX-07

In DX-07 we have once again a performance lead of the AGP 2X setting that is against the trend we see otherwise.

Light-05

And again .......

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