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AGP 8X: Why do we need it?

B

bonkers325

Lifer
eVGA has put up an article entitled: AGP 8X: Why do we need it, and what does it do? If you want to basically know the ins and outs of the new AGP 8X spec soon to bless us with its appearance then I suggest you take a gander at this article. Here is a snip:

In the past, AGP bandwidth has been scaled up at regular intervals. AGP1X and 2X were introduced simultaneously and AGP4X was introduced 2 years later. Now, AGP8X is recognized as the natural progression beyond AGP4X. It is expected to satisfy the bandwidth demands on the graphics interface for at least 2 generations.

Link
 
well agp 4x works pretty badly on my computer with a via chipset so i'm not very anxious to see what they will do with agp 4x. anyways there's no performance improvement between 2x and 4x.
 
true 8X is worthless hype now... but if they don't start introducing these technologies early, then by the time they are really needed, only the newest generation of motherboards will support it, which would segment the retail market.

When they 1st introduced AGP it wasn't any faster than PCI (or didn't result in any faster scores).

sorry if that didn't make much sense...getting sleepy....
 
8x AGP seems pretty useless, 4x over 2x speeds isn't even noticeable. But if they come up with 64-bit/128-bit AGP bus, then maybe it will make a difference.
 
As it says in that article, it'll become more important in the future when more programs rely on the AGP bus for streaming rather than burst modes.

Also video card memory is very expensive and sometimes adding more of it is not an option. In that case high AGP speeds certainly help when you're forced to move textures from the RAM to the video card during gameplay.
 
I would think the latency of the bus is more of a problem than the bandwidth. wouldn't you need to buffer a lot if you really wanted to use that bus well?
 
Well, AGP in 4X mode is already about as fast as PC-133 SDRAM (~1Gb/s) and in reality it's no faster than 2X mode, cause your RAM bandwidth mostly isn't nearly as big as it theoretically should be. But lately, when P4 arrived with it's huge bandwidth RDRAM, AGP 4X may really become justify itself on that platform (just my guess). AGP 8X is a bit overkill at least now, just as ATA-100, but it doesn't hurt to make some headroom for future (as lon as it's backward compatible 🙂 )...

AGP 1X was 2 times faster than PCI, graphic cards back then just doesn't needed that extra bandwidth (they were designed to hold all textures in card's own memory and games didn't use large textures).

BTW, guys, AGP isn't bus (it's not shared with other devices), AGP stands for Accelated Graphics Port.
 
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