Originally posted by Ostsol:
[Um. . . no. ATI cards have been able to store vertex data in video memory ever since the original Radeons (with the exception of the Radeon VE).
hum… this has never happened with my 8500LE dude! It seems that vertex data are more or less cached into vram but not statically stored there. AGP at best. Btw, this can be different with latest ATI boards regarding what are saying Humus and Ysaneya.
[This message has been edited by Ozzy (edited 11-23-2003).]
Originally posted by Ozzy:
hum… this has never happened with my 8500LE dude! It seems that vertex data are more or less cached into vram but not statically stored there. AGP at best. Btw, this can be different with latest ATI boards regarding what are saying Humus and Ysaneya.
That’s very strange, as the whole point of compiled vertex arrays and VAO is to store data server-side. Well, VAO is great for another reason as it allows one to define multiple separate buffers, but at the very least, there’s not much point to CVAs if the data is stored on the client.
Ostsol,
“Server side” means so many different things.
Most games are fill bound. This means that you should probably not put vertex transfer load on the VRAM bus, where your framebuffer and textures already live. Instead, it seems like a good idea to put the vertices in AGP, where you get an extra “free” 1-2 GB/s of bandwidth. Assuming no darn application comes in and wants to use the memory bandwidth for something else at the same time 