VOGONS


i740 plus DDR

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First post, by Branco

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Ok. What happens when you put an intel 740 graphics card with 4MB on an universal agp slot in a motherboard with pc3200 ?

Reply 5 of 10, by canthearu

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Branco wrote:

I have the mboard and the card. Was going to test it because i red i740 used the onboard mem as a buffer but uused the system mem... Are you sure no efect?

Intel i740 uses system memory for textures, and transfers those textures to the card as it is rendering using AGP. It has it's own framebuffer memory however.

It isn't a very good card, the choice to do texturing over AGP for everything was a poor choice. Putting it into a very fast computer, even if it works, won't do too much for performance.

Reply 6 of 10, by dionb

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The choice to do everything over AGP was an excellent strategic choice for Intel, as it allowed them to design a video core without any frame buffer at all. This was a discrete dry run for the GMA in the i810 GMCH, which from an enthousiast perspective was awful, but marked the start of Intel's dominance in the video market. Of all the video chip manufacturers around in 1998, only ATi and nVidia have survived in that market, and ATi only managed it by the AMD merger. And yes, it's the victory of mediocrity ('good enough' technology), but 'good enough' killed everyone else (except perhaps 3Dfx that rather committed suicide assisted by nVidia).

Reply 7 of 10, by canthearu

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I kinda disagree.

In terms of having the technology to plow into the 8xx series chip-sets, sure it was helpful to have a design more or less ready to go. In terms of it being a big independent money maker, it didn't help Intel at all. Sure, Intel graphics run a huge percentage of computers now, but Intel really don't get paid anything for that privilege. Intel chipsets with integrated graphics are the cheap, low end ones, running cheap versions of the chipsets.

Intel hasn't been able so say, this chipset/cpu with integrated graphics costs $15-$20 more than this equivalent one without integrated graphics, and have people take them seriously.

If Intel had realised a high performance, scale-able design with the i740, then Intel could have made a good profit making video cards. Hence why they keep trying to make wacky entrances into the discrete graphics market.

Reply 8 of 10, by dionb

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canthearu wrote:
I kinda disagree. […]
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I kinda disagree.

In terms of having the technology to plow into the 8xx series chip-sets, sure it was helpful to have a design more or less ready to go. In terms of it being a big independent money maker, it didn't help Intel at all. Sure, Intel graphics run a huge percentage of computers now, but Intel really don't get paid anything for that privilege. Intel chipsets with integrated graphics are the cheap, low end ones, running cheap versions of the chipsets.

Intel hasn't been able so say, this chipset/cpu with integrated graphics costs $15-$20 more than this equivalent one without integrated graphics, and have people take them seriously.

If Intel had realised a high performance, scale-able design with the i740, then Intel could have made a good profit making video cards. Hence why they keep trying to make wacky entrances into the discrete graphics market.

A lot of what Intel does isn't about profit per unit but about market dominance. They make their big profits on the high-end enthousiast chips and on the server markets, but they make just as much profit on extremely high volumes of low unit profit on the rest. If you're buying a high-end GPU you're most likely to have a very profitable high-end Intel CPU as well - but you're a small minority.. The majority just go with the cheap integrated solution, and that's money in the bank for Intel too. The masses simply don't want to spend extra for VGA, but they need a chipset and Intel rakes it in there. Cynically, they actually charge more these days for the same chipset without the iGPU, or rather without the iGPU support in it being activated.

Theoretically Intel could throw huge amounts of money at a high-end GPU, but it would be less profitable than what they do now, would lead to unwelcome regulatory scrutiny and so the bean counters kill these projects before they get too big. The real reason Intel repeatedly starts GPU projects is just to experiment with new features for the iGPU before the fab process advances to the point of being able to economically integrate them.

Reply 9 of 10, by The Serpent Rider

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Are you sure no efect?

i740 is an AGP 2x card, so ~500mb/sec via AGP texturing (lower on practice).

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.