4x agp or 8x?

[Furbiekiller]

Wondering if when I get a geforce FX card if I should spend the money around 100$ and get 8x agp or just use my 4x agp now. Is it really going to make a big diff if I dont get 8x agp?

 

[WaTaGuMp]

Everything I have read about AGP 8x its not a big deal right now. Down the line that could change so I say get it and hope that when it does make a difference then you will have it and not have to worry about an upgrade.

 

[bikinistud]

Now i might be wrong but unless you have a top of the line CPU and some awesome memory that is tweaked, it is just more useless bandwidth. The radeon 9700 pro doesn't have a system as of yet to take full advantage of it's awesome bandwidth and the GFX is suppose to have more.

You may see a slight difference 5-10% but it might be better to take that $100 and put toward either the card itself, its going to be darn expensive, or to buy something else.

 

[bikinistud]

so i was a little late.....

 

[snidy]

I'm getting a new mb with 8x, I'm sure within a year, I'll be able to take advantage of it.

 

[amdwolfman]

AMD XP 1800 @ 1610
Soyo Dragon +
VisionTek Ti4600 Geforce 4
768 MB Crucial DDR 2100
Two WD 40 gig HD
Turtle Beach SantaCruz
Antec 400 Watt power sup.
Windows XP Home


So,How much you want for your card?

 

[Budmantom]

From what I've seen if you disable 4x and enable 2x you might see 5% difference 10% if your lucky.

 

[KingofFah]

Wait a second, you are getting 8X now. Why is this? Because you want to spend the 100$ now and not have to worry about it when it is probably like 50-70 for an even better board later on? Interesting.

 

[jiffylube1024]

There is NO difference in performance with current AGP 8X cards. The difference is under 1%.

The whole concept of AGP speed is somewhat flawed, since in an ideal case you want to never use it. The purpose of AGP memory transfers is that in case the card's onboard memory gets used up, it can dip into system memory faster than without AGP. However, even with AGP 2X, 4X, and 8X, the bandwidth of the system memory is still way lower than the memory on the card, and it SERIOUSLY slows performance. This is why we have cards with 128MB coming out so soon after the introduction of 64MB cards: for 3d apps and games, there is a huge slowdown when you are using more memory than what's on the card. For example, with AGP 8X, you have ~2.1 GB/s of bandwidth to the system memory (equal to PC2100's 2.1 GB/s). The onboard memory of a Radeon 8500 is ~17 GB/s. Clearly, AGP speed is still the bottleneck.

So, to sum it up: AGP 8X provides NO TANGIBLE difference over AGP 4X. Also, AGP 4X barely provides any upgrade to AGP 2X. The difference is in the size and speed of the memory on the card. If you want faster performance in games, get a faster card, with more memory.