Comment What's the real bottleneck here? (Score 2) 125
The article says that there's no rendering bottleneck, but there is still a bandwidth hit proportional to the amount of super-sampling you're doing. That's correct, however it says that the cost of that bandwidth hit will be offset by advances in bandwidth-conservation or enhances (new memory, Z-compression etc).
Is this really the case? If graphics and PC architecture have shown us anything it's that memory bandwidth is the thing that's slowing us down the most, and that problem is only getting worse. Graphics chipsets are already using what seems to be fairly extreme memory technology. Current nVidia chipsets are running on 128-bit-wide 230MHz DDR SDRAM (almost 460MHz effective), and they're already memory-bandwidth-limited without adding a 4x memory bandwidth increase. Memory technology is getting better, but not at anywhere near the speed that graphics technology is improving.
The article does mention some techniques for offsetting the huge gap we've currently got between CPU and memory capabilities, some of which are being used on ATI's Radeon, but are these techniques effective enough to offset a 4x memory bandwidth penalty? Any ideas?
Is this really the case? If graphics and PC architecture have shown us anything it's that memory bandwidth is the thing that's slowing us down the most, and that problem is only getting worse. Graphics chipsets are already using what seems to be fairly extreme memory technology. Current nVidia chipsets are running on 128-bit-wide 230MHz DDR SDRAM (almost 460MHz effective), and they're already memory-bandwidth-limited without adding a 4x memory bandwidth increase. Memory technology is getting better, but not at anywhere near the speed that graphics technology is improving.
The article does mention some techniques for offsetting the huge gap we've currently got between CPU and memory capabilities, some of which are being used on ATI's Radeon, but are these techniques effective enough to offset a 4x memory bandwidth penalty? Any ideas?
