User manual SONY VAIO VGN-SR490J

[. . . ] The hp fx10 provides twice the geometry performance of the hp fx5. A detailed look at the individual components of the hp fx5 and fx10 follows. Host Interface Chip Communication between the host computer system and the graphics device is via a host interface chip residing on the hp fx5 and fx10. In order to operate at peak performance levels, the hp fx5 and fx10 support 133MHz AGP 2X DMA (Direct Memory Access) to transfer geometric, pixel, and texture data from the application to the graphics device. Unlike other data transfer methods, DMA is the only method which utilizes 100% of the available AGP bus cycles. [. . . ] Since real applications simultaneously access their own internal data structures while generating graphics data, the maximum sustainable geometry data bandwidth is only half of that, or 530MB/sec. Inherent front side bus latencies and application overhead further limit the net geometry bandwidth to 400MB/sec or less. Any excess bandwidth to the graphics device would be wasted, and any less would create a bottleneck. The hp fx5 and fx10 graphics accelerators are designed to provide peak performance for real applications, which can not afford to sit idle while data is being transmitted to the graphics device. Once the device driver initiates a DMA data transfer, the host interface chip retrieves the data from main memory asynchronously, freeing the host CPU for other tasks. Compared to PIO (Programmed I/O) and AGP 4X with Fast Writes, this results in vastly improved application performance. 1 A triangle strip primitive containing 10 triangles will have four bytes of overhead, followed by 12 24-byte vertices, for a total of 292 bytes. This is an average of 29 bytes/triangle. When comparing AGP 2X DMA to AGP 4X with Fast Writes, keep the following in mind: · AGP 4X with Fast Writes occupies the CPU while writing data to the graphics device, preventing your application from doing other useful work. AGP 2X DMA frees the host CPU while writing data to the graphics device, resulting in superior application performance. · Claims that 900MB/sec bandwidth is required for today's graphics applications is simply wrong. In fact, 400MB/sec is sufficient to transmit over 14 million triangles/sec to the graphics device. Furthermore, a 900MB/sec data transfer rate is unattainable by real applications on systems with a 133MHz front side bus. The hp fx5 contains 64MB total shared framebuffer/texture SDR memory running at 166MHz. The hp fx10 supports 64MB of fast SDR memory also running 166MHz. OpenGL Support The hp fx5 and fx10 provide industry leading OpenGL performance, featuring an optimized display list execution path and enhanced state change architecture. Both the hp fx5 and fx10 meet the conformance requirements for the OpenGL 1. 1 industry standard. In addition, the hp fx5 and fx10 support several OpenGL extensions, so applications can access hardware features that are not exposed through the OpenGL 1. 1 API. The extensions include: · Industry standard OpenGL 1. 1 texture mapping extensions, such as generate mipmap, texture border clamp, shadow, and depth texture. · Many features which are part of the OpenGL 1. 2 standard are supported through extensions, including: BGRA pixel formats; three dimensional texture maps; normal rescaling; texture coordinate edge clamping; and texture lighting. · The hp texture color table extension. · The hp draw array set extension, which allows rendering of multiple individual primitives through the vertex array feature. · SONY extensions for visibility testing, which can be used directly by an OpenGL application, or indirectly via the DirectModel or Fahrenheit APIs. · The hp supersample extension, which provides support for full scene antialiasing. · The vertex array, polygon offset, and subtexture features, which were only avail able as extensions under OpenGL 1. 0, are supported via both the OpenGL 1. 1 interface as well as the OpenGL 1. 0 extension interface for backwards compatibility. · Support for standard Windows NT® and Windows 2000 Professional® extensions, including paletted textures and swap hint. [. . . ] Features include: · Standard DirectDraw and Direct3D features, such as vertex and table fog, multitexturing, 32 and 16 bit textures, and direct framebuffer access, supported in hardware. · 24 bit color and 16 bit Z buffers. · Hardware support for 16 bit/pixel video overlay at all resolutions. · Hardware support for scalable YUV video overlay. [. . . ]