AGP 4x, how much life does it have left in it?

[ChrisPi]

I've read alot of people write that next years AGP 8x will be useless so I'm not going to wait for it and I'm going to build a new AGP 4x system in about a month. My question is, how much of AGP 4x is being utilized now and how effective will it be going forward (on games like Unreal 2 and Doom 3)? I'm assuming that AGP 8x video cards in the future will be 8x/4x so I'll still be able to uprade my AGP 4x system to one of these newer cards.

 

[downhiller80]

Like you say, don't worry about it. You could run a belting setup on AGP 2x and barely notice the difference.

The AGP speed is all about how fast the graphics card can address the system memory. And with 32MB/64MB cards this barely ever happens. It's kinda pointless really, IMHO.

- seb

 

[bjc112]

Unless u transfer like 100 meg grpahic file from the vdieo card... it is pretty usless!

On my Geforce 3 ... i put it on 2x.. and only lost 100 points in 3dmark to check!

 

[mindiris]

It'd matta not like you said. If any game did use it extensvely, it wouldn't run very fast anyway, thus missing the point. What was it, 512MB/s, and about 7GB/s for the memory on the video card. It's not even a close match if anything wanted to use large amounts of textures across the AGP bus.

 

[TunaBoo]

From hat I heard, 4x will be the max AMD has for a while. Intel will be 8x, AMD will be 4X. I could be wrong...

 

[igowerf]

<< From hat I heard, 4x will be the max AMD has for a while. Intel will be 8x, AMD will be 4X. I could be wrong... >>



Sounds like Intel is totally going for "bigger is better" marketing angle.

 

[Rand]

<< From hat I heard, 4x will be the max AMD has for a while. Intel will be 8x, AMD will be 4X. I could be wrong... >>



VIA, and SiS plan to support it on their Athlon boards, in all likelyhood ALi will as well.
AMD... well, besides the 760MPX I don't expect to see any more AMD chipsets untill the Hammer' debutes

 

[ArchAngel777]

AGP1X/2X all we need for now.

It does not matter if you had AGP 8X even, it still would only have 2GB/sec for bandwidth... Which is at best pathetic.

The only need for AGP was the bypass of the CPU permission. AGP is a BIG deal, just not the speed of it. Local memory on GFX cards will always meet the need of todays games, and if they dont, then games will run slow, even if you have AGP 8X when it comes out... In order for AGP to be benificial for Texture memory it would have to be like AGP 20X+ or something... Which would a hell of a lot of bandwidth.


I am giving you theory, if you want real world explanation, just look at any review, or test it yourself... You will find no difference in AGP 2X or AGP 4X.


I wrote this a long time ago,

"AGP4X with an 8Meg video card will indeed be faster than that same card running at 1X, but not noticeably. And even though it would be faster, it would still be PATHETIC performance. It's like the difference from 5 FPS to 8 FPS... point is they both suck. "

Hope that helps.