[The Dude]

Yea, it's me again. I got a quickie that has been on my mind for some time now. On Apple's site (the iMac section to be specfic) it states that the ATI Rage128 AGP card found in the iMac has the ability (through the drivers) to use main memory as video memory.

Can anyone explain the details about this technique?

P.S. The site is www.apple.com/imac/graphics.html

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Paranoia-
You only have to be right once to make it all worthwhile

-Unknown

[blizzard]

I can't really explain the low-down details (I'm sure someone else can though) but this is a feature of AGP, not of the card. It's really just another bottleneck, though, because the main memory is so much slower than the VRAM available on the card. Kinda like, virtual memory as compared to real memory.

Blizzard.

[roders]

AGP allows Texture Maps to be stored in system memory, these can be the largest things loaded into VRam, but as the post above say's system Ram tends to be to slow to make much of a difference, but it does mean in theory that a game that uses large Texture Maps will not run out of V/Ram (& massivelly slow down or crash your computer).

[The Dude]

Thanks! That does clear up the confusion I had with that feature. Here I was thinking that the originally stated 8MB of VRAM in the Rage128 Mobility in my Pismo was actually some 100MB of main RAM that I had. Again, thanks a bunch!

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Paranoia-
You only have to be right once to make it all worthwhile

-Unknown