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

While we're not huge fans of synthetic benchmarks we needed a way to test VIA's AGP 4X implementation so we used Intel's Platform Bandwidth Test that simply runs a quick test to measure the throughput of the AGP bus. As you can see, the Apollo Pro 133A falls close to 30% behind what the i820 is capable of pumping through the AGP bus. The addition of VC-SDRAM accounted for an extra 3% increase in performance, but nothing that could hope to bring the Apollo Pro 133A up to par with the 820 in AGP performance.

Using the AGP 4X Transfer Test (a part of Intel's AGP test suite) we can begin to see how bombarding even the GeForce 256 with textures can force it to almost rely on the AGP bus, in this case the Apollo Pro 133A is 17% slower than the i820 and 10% slower if VC-SDRAM is used, but it is still not up to par with the i820.