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Nvidia's Virtual AGP design…

...will beat competition to market with boards

Virtual AGP design is also one of the many features that have emerged from Nvidia’s laboratories. This is one of the basic proofs that this company wants to have its fingers in all categories, from the lowest to the highest. Virtual AGP is designed for older computer systems without any AGP slot. Specially targeted machines are the many i810 mainboards which do not provide any AGP slots. The i810 chipset just has integrated VGA, with practically no 3D features, as well as many PCI, slots which means that there's no AGP 3D gaming power available. Besides this, for many i810 and i810e mainboards on market this will be a very useful feature, particularly for Socket 7 which doesn't have an AGP port. The solution for this problem is a patent from Nvidia called “Virtual AGP”. It provides high performance AGP style graphical options for Non AGP slot systems. It's based on unique NVIDIA texture management technology – Virtual AGP. Believe it or not, it provides AGP style texturing in standard PCI slot. The benefits from this technology will mainly be AGP functionality on the PCI bus followed with better performance and higher resolutions. Products based on it will enable very large texture memory support on all systems. It will provide full speed DVD decode with no increased CPU utilisation. One cool thing for Graphiczilla is that it currently doesn't have any competition in the market with similar solutions and it's much more affordable to upgrade, than to buy a new AGP based system and card. Nvidia's close partners will offer two basic models of this cards: a TNT2 M64 PRO based VAGP card with 64-bit 133Mhz chip with 166 Mhz memory clock and with 16 and 32 MB of display buffer and a more powerful TNT2 PRO based VAG-P card with a 128-bit, 143Mhz chip with 166 Mhz memory clock with 32 MB of display buffer. Both cards are likely to support Open GL ICD, large textures up to 2048x2048 and will work with 32 bit color and 32 bit Z/stencill buffer. According to Nvidia’s tests these other cards are faster than Voodoo 3 2000 and 3000 PCI. Expect this technology later this this quarter or early in the next quarter. We are expecting first products very soon. ®

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