Influence of memory brandwith

[thekey]

Where would you say in 3d worlds memory brandwith becomes more decisive (besides AA for instance)?

[JHoxley]

Where would you say in 3d worlds memory brandwith becomes more decisive (besides AA for instance)?You can't really answer that without a lot more context.

Typically you'll get 3 potential bandwidth bottlenecks:

1. Texture fetching: Where a pixel shader is pulling lots of samples from either lots of different textures, or from the same texture.

2. Output writing: Where there is lots of reading/writing from the frame buffer (e.g. lots of alpha blending)

3. Geometry: Much rarer in my experience, but you can get the transform unit stalling when waiting to fetch more vertices/triangles.

Jack

[Dio]

The most major consumer of bandwidth is usually the Z-buffer, although the colour buffer can generate more traffic if blending is on, Z compression is good and the Z ordering is poor.