An Alternative
AGP Texture Execute
- Avoid the texture memory management issue all together
- The host system has “infinite” memory available
- Poor texture access latency
- Texturing pipeline must stall while the texel data is brought across the bus
- Generates AGP bus traffic each time a texel is used
- On-chip caches help, but not enough
- Texture traffic clashes with vertex traffic
- In a typical graphics system, the AGP bus is still being used to transfer vertex data, while texturing is occuring
- An ineffective solution
- Performance cost is too high
Little On-board Texture Memory
Texture Map loaded in system memory