Sidney

ATI HAS developed a new technology to allow system memory to be fully utilised by graphics boards, it said today. The extra bandwidth of the PCI Express bus means that shuttling data to and fro between the graphics and system buses is now not a major bottleneck. ATI suggest that this will mean that less RAM can be used on graphics boards, cutting down on system costs.
The real story here, at least at the high end, is one that we discussed with ATI technology gurus months ago. Game programmers will be starting to use PCIe as a way to get the graphics to do calculations the CPU is too busy to do. GPUs will be able to use idle time to calculate things like physics operations, interacting with both the CPU and the main memory, and resulting in a lift of load off the CPU.

This was impossible on the AGP bus, as bandwidth from the AGP port to the main system bus was far too slow and laggy. The net result should be some interesting programming techniques in games to fully use the power of the combined platform, rather than bottlenecking so much at any one point.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18538

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