i bought a sgi visual 320 and everything is allright but what i don't understand is the memory bandwith sgi claims is 3.2gig/sec now that is too technical for me and i need to know what does that mean,plain and simple.i do work with lightwave and maya.What is the advantage of having this bandwith???????
more info can pass through the pipes to get to the cpu/hardrive.
the more bandwidth...the more efficient ur pc..so 3.2 aint bad...
err...at least thats what ive been told..
-M-K-
PC's currently have a memory bandwidth of somewhere around 800-1200mb/sec. DDR, the new Rambus ram and Quad DDR should change that though.
The faster the memory bus, the faster data can get from the CPU to it. Therefore, rendering should be faster because it can supply the CPU(s) with more memory. I have not looked at the memory bandwidth specs for the 320 (even though we have 5 in the shop here), but in the 512MB in each, it is split into 3 pairs of proprietary RAM modules. Maybe there is a direct bus to each bank? Could this perhaps be the bus between the CPU and the Cobalt chipset (graphics) or RAM and the chipset?
Even DDR RAM on the 100 MHz bus is only going to run you a theoretical maximum of 1.6GB/s.. Performance benchmarks that I have seen on it have not showed much of an improvement over SDRAM, but hey, every 1% adds up.
Sean