Feature connector
internal connector used in older graphics cards
The feature connector was an internal connector found mostly in some older ISA, VESA Local Bus, and PCI graphics cards, but also on some early AGP ones. It was intended for use by devices that needed to exchange large amounts of data with the graphics card without hogging a computer system's CPU or data bus, such as TV tuner cards, video capture cards, MPEG video decoders (e.g. SGS Thomson MPEG Decoder), and first generation 3D graphic accelerator cards. Early examples include the IBM EGA video adapter.
Several standards existed for feature connectors, depending on the bus and graphics card type. Most of them were simply an 8, 16 or 32-bit wide internal connector, transferring data between the graphics card and another device, bypassing the system's CPU and memory completely.
Their speeds often far exceeded the speed of normal ISA or even early PCI buses, e.g. 40 MB/s for a standard ISA-based SVGA, up to 150 MB/s for a VESA-based or PCI-based one, while the standard 16 bit ISA bus ran at ~5.3 MB/s and the VESA bus at up to 160 MB/s bandwidth. The feature connector bandwidths were far beyond the capabilities of e.g. a 386, 486 and barely handled by an early Pentium.
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This entry incorporates text from “Feature connector” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.