VIA Apollo Pro 133A & VCSDRAM - Part 2: The Performance

Conclusion

As a purely gaming solution, the Apollo Pro Plus 133A isn't what we hoped it would be. The AGP performance tests indicate that VIA's AGP 4X implementation is around 30% slower than Intel's AGP 4X implementation on the i820. But wait a minute, isn't everyone always saying how big of a joke AGP is? The fact of the matter is that AGP still isn't used intensely during today's games and the AGP texturing benchmarks Intel supplied us with are exaggerations of what actual gameplay would involve, simply to illustrate the performance potential AGP 4X offers over AGP 2X.

In the future this may very well change and gamers may begin to truly notice a performance increase on AGP 4X platforms versus AGP 2X platforms. But as time goes on, the amount of local memory on video cards will definitely increase, with most boards shipping with 32MB now and the trend towards 64MB+ in the future, will we ever really become dependent on AGP?

Chances are that we won't, and VIA's slower AGP implementation will mean that only the slow points in games take the performance hit, when textures are already being sent over the AGP bus. So, instead of having a range of frame rates from 30 fps to 90 fps, the lower end of that range would drop to 20 fps.

We had hoped that the use of VC-SDRAM would clear up any performance issues in games with the Apollo Pro 133A, but, unfortunately, that was not the case. The performance improvement in games was minimal and it did not even raise the performance to beyond what the BX is already capable of achieving. The hard core gamer will probably end up footing the cost of RDRAM and migrating to the i820 platform, which isn't a bad decision, it's just not going to be a cheap one.

For the average user that is looking to take advantage of the new 133MHz FSB processors, the Apollo Pro 133A makes quite a bit of sense. If you're not too hung over on the issue of frame rates in games and are more concerned with overall system performance and cost then this may be just what the doctor ordered. The sub-par AGP 4X implementation of the 133A will keep it from being the gamer's dream, but not everyone is a gamer and there are people that are looking for better overall system performance, not necessarily in Quake 3 alone. For this type of a user, the Apollo Pro 133A makes perfect sense because it is cheaper than i820 (considering memory costs). It acts as more of a bridge between the current BX platform and the future platforms without requiring a large investment on your part (you can just re-use your old SDRAM).

For businesses looking to take advantage of the latest 133MHz FSB CPUs, the Apollo Pro 133A once again makes more sense than the BX chipset, since it keeps the upgrade path open to future Pentium III E processors (Coppermine) without requiring a large up-front investment.

From the standpoint of a professional user, BX is still the way to go if you're on a budget, otherwise it seems like the i820 is the only other single-processor option. The 3D Studio MAX benchmarks show that even with the added performance of the 133MHz FSB, it took the use of VC-SDRAM on the Apollo Pro 133A to beat out the BX at 100MHz by a measly one-tenth of a second. The Apollo Pro 133A is just not a high-end solution, but then again, it was never meant to be one.

In response to the question we posed before entering the performance analysis: is the Apollo Pro 133A faster than the good ol' Intel BX chipset? When using the 133MHz FSB, the answer is generally yes, but even with that FSB advantage it isn't faster by a large enough margin to justify upgrading, which is the consensus we came to on the issue of the 133MHz FSB when we took a look at the i820 chipset and the Pentium III B.  

The next question is: does Virtual Channel SDRAM 'buy back' some of the performance deficit the Apollo Pro 133A holds in comparison to the i820?  In some cases it does, such as the 3D Studio MAX test where memory bandwidth and the efficient use of it is critical to a high performing system.  But in other cases, like in our gaming and AGP performance tests it doesn't make up for the slower AGP implementation of the Apollo Pro 133A.

Of course, if performance is not your top concern, then the BX platform is still a very good platform to stick behind. The initial AGP 4X benchmarks have been very disappointing and although NVIDIA claims that their GeForce 256 works optimally in AGP 4X mode, the performance differences we've been able to note have been minimal at best. The performance improvement the 133MHz FSB offers is not great enough to justify a major upgrade and the current 133MHz FSB processors are offering a very small performance improvement if any at all over their 100MHz counterparts. While the latter will change with the Pentium III E, the performance of a Pentium III 450 on a BX platform is in no way sub-par.

It's funny to think that, while Intel is releasing 133MHz FSB processors there are still a large number of users out there that are more than happy with their 66MHz FSB Celerons that they picked up for under $100 and for them, the BX is doing just fine. Price is king in the world of competition.