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AGP was designed to allow faster access to memory because VRAM was expensive. There was just enough for the framebuffers. Texture size was known to be huge, whi

AGP was designed to allow faster access to memory because VRAM was expensive. There was just enough for the framebuffers. Texture size was known to be huge, which would live in RDRAM b/c VRAM would have been crazy expensive (I think the dual 3DFx at the time was like $1k). Also Intel was investing heavily in RDRAM (remember that?). The idea of integrating graphics and southbridge was on the long-term roadmap, which would use UMA (unified memory architecture) to make cheap mobos, which board vendors were begging for. So this also figured into the decision: it wasn't about the graphics crown, it was about selling CPUs. These became the 810 and 815, which the game developers HATED because it held back progress for years: the 810 was the most common graphics chipset by I believe more than one order of magnitude. So yes, cost cutting due to the desire to dominate the motherboard market, which they did, which led to even more market for their CPUs. Even at the expense of overall graphics software performance for years.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
I remember when AGP came out and it was advertised as making it possible to store textures in RAM, requiring your GPU to only have enough VRAM to act as a cache and frame buffer. It quickly became apparent that AGP, even as AGP 8x became a thing, wasn't fast enough to do the job, as every GPU still had tons of VRAM.
thereddaikon 5y ago
Thanks for the insight. Seems they had a similar line of thinking that Nintendo went down with the N64. They gave SGI a lot of money to develop a world beating GPU at the time and then gave it no memory and expected it to share RDRAM with the CPU. I don't think they even gave it DMA support. And I don't care what Apple or Sony or anyone else says in their keynotes, UMA is always a cost cutting measure. From the perspective of the late 90's I can see the appeal. Rambus was supposed to be the future. One would think the high latency of the memory would have been more apparent though. And of course RDRAM had its downfall not all that long after. I still have in my collection a Willamette P4 and its RDRAM modules I salvaged from one of those ill fated systems. I'm not sure how much the Intel IGP held back gaming, best I can remember nobody seriously tried to game on it. Many games outright didn't support the chipset. And those that did didn't work well. For years I gave the advice that gaming meant dedicated video card and the IGP was only good for displaying normal applications. This changed temporarily with the first Iris GPUs in early Core. They were actually competitive with AMD and Nvidia's IGPs at the time. That lasted maybe a year or two.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

I remember when AGP came out and it was advertised as making it possible to store textures in RAM, requiring your GPU to only have enough VRAM to act as a cache and frame buffer. It quickly became apparent that AGP, even as AGP 8x became a thing, wasn't fast enough to do the job, as every GPU still had tons of VRAM.

thereddaikon 5y ago

Thanks for the insight. Seems they had a similar line of thinking that Nintendo went down with the N64. They gave SGI a lot of money to develop a world beating GPU at the time and then gave it no memory and expected it to share RDRAM with the CPU. I don't think they even gave it DMA support. And I don't care what Apple or Sony or anyone else says in their keynotes, UMA is always a cost cutting measure. From the perspective of the late 90's I can see the appeal. Rambus was supposed to be the future. One would think the high latency of the memory would have been more apparent though. And of course RDRAM had its downfall not all that long after. I still have in my collection a Willamette P4 and its RDRAM modules I salvaged from one of those ill fated systems. I'm not sure how much the Intel IGP held back gaming, best I can remember nobody seriously tried to game on it. Many games outright didn't support the chipset. And those that did didn't work well. For years I gave the advice that gaming meant dedicated video card and the IGP was only good for displaying normal applications. This changed temporarily with the first Iris GPUs in early Core. They were actually competitive with AMD and Nvidia's IGPs at the time. That lasted maybe a year or two.