Introduction

Once again Nvidia, PowerVR, ATI and others are releasing new video cards that are faster than ever and with more RAM on board than the last generation. And the games are lining up too, take Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, Halo, Messiah, MDK II to name a few. New 3D engines are demanding more and more RAM, either local video memory or AGP memory located in your system.

Why? On one hand stronger 3D engines just need more memory and CPU power to build up the 3D world. One major part is texturing. Texturing is the process of putting images on a three dimensional block. This is done because rendering every stone you see on a wall is nearly impossible and very impractical.

This article will talk about memory bandwidth, the problems related to it, and several possible solutions.