AGP Diminishing Returns

[Mover]

Hi folks,

Can anyone say at what point buying a high speed video card is just a waste of money?

At what point does the slot bottleneck performance?

My MB has an AGP 4X slot and I've been looking at the nVidia 6800 4X/8X cards. Would a 6800 GT 256 be over kill? Will The 6800 128 be the most efficient?

My concern is less about being able to play a certain game, like Doom 3, which I know a 6800 128 will do it, but I think future software and ending up with an inadequate card in a short time. I know I'll need a better PC in a couple of years, but I'm thinking to put it off as long a possible.

TIA

Mover

 

[dug777]

AGP 4x is effectively no bottleneck at all as i understand it...

It would be helpful if you gave us some more info on the rest of your rig tho 🙂

 

[Hacp]

THere is no bottleneck for AGP cards as of right now. ATI or Nvidia could release their full speced cards out right now, and they will perform exactly the same as the PCI-E versions.

 

[MDE]

The other two posters are dead on. However, an AGP 4x based system is probably going to have a couple bottlenecks in it (CPU, RAM). What do you currently have in there? It may just not be worth it to upgrade the video card.

 

[orangat]

An AGP 4x slot is probably an AXP m/b. A 6800gt is probably overkill for an AXP cpu.

 

[dug777]

Originally posted by: orangat
An AGP 4x slot is probably an AXP m/b. A 6800gt is probably overkill for an AXP cpu.

i disagree (ask synthdude, who runs a 2.4ghz Axp and a 6800GT) 😉

I'd love to have a 6800GT or GTO^2 paired with my tbred B at 2.1 ghz, my 6600GT really doesn't cut it if i want AA in games even at 1024.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: dug777

Originally posted by: orangat
An AGP 4x slot is probably an AXP m/b. A 6800gt is probably overkill for an AXP cpu.

i disagree (ask synthdude, who runs a 2.4ghz Axp and a 6800GT) 😉

I'd love to have a 6800GT or GTO^2 paired with my tbred B at 2.1 ghz, my 6600GT really doesn't cut it if i want AA in games even at 1024.

Yeah, an Athlon XP will probably be somewhat of a bottleneck, but much less so if you like to play at high resolutions with all the details on. It depends on the speed too, if it's not overclocked as much as mine is, then the bottleneck will be more apparent. Also, I could even notice (very very obvious) slowdowns below 20fps at times in games at 1024x768 on my old 9700 Pro (especially when using 4xAA in FarCry, for example), so I don't think the extra graphics power is really wasted much on an AXP at all. As far as I can tell from a quick glance at the FS/T forums now and then, you can generally get a used AGP 6800GT for not much over $200 these days, which I think is a good price for the performance you get.

 

[Mover]

The computer is a Dell WS 340, 768MB RAM, 2.8Ghz P4, 400FSB, ATI 128 32 MB, 200 GB HD, DVD-RW,+RW, Windows XP sp2, w/Dell E193FP display. Dell says the PSU is 250W, but I've heard that they are conservative on this and it's more like 300W.

Mover

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: orangat
An AGP 4x slot is probably an AXP m/b. A 6800gt is probably overkill for an AXP cpu.

This and this might change your mind.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Mover
The computer is a Dell WS 340, 768MB RAM, 2.8Ghz P4, 400FSB, ATI 128 32 MB, 200 GB HD, DVD-RW,+RW, Windows XP sp2, w/Dell E193FP display. Dell says the PSU is 250W, but I've heard that they are conservative on this and it's more like 300W.

Mover

If I'm not mistaken, Dell uses PSU's made by PC Power and Cooling. They tend to rate their power supplies accurately... a 250 watt PSU from them is capable of putting out a constant 250 wats, and peaks to 300 watts. A PSU made by another manufacturer with similar specs would be labeled a 300 watt power supply.

 

[Mover]

Thanks, that's what I wanted to know.

BTW: Where can that information be found? I searched all over the place before posting the question.

Thanks again

Mover

Originally posted by: Hacp
THere is no bottleneck for AGP cards as of right now. ATI or Nvidia could release their full speced cards out right now, and they will perform exactly the same as the PCI-E versions.

 

[gsellis]

The only application that I know of that has a bottleneck at AGP is Avid/Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6.x/7.x when editing 1080i video. For that, they recommend PCI-e cards with 256MB of memory. I have seen the demo, and AGP is slower and does less, but the data rates can be huge.

This is a video editor that uses DirectX 9 to do video rendering in real-time.

 

[Fern]

Originally posted by: orangat
An AGP 4x slot is probably an AXP m/b. A 6800gt is probably overkill for an AXP cpu.

Sorry, must disagree here.

See my spec's in sig below.

I've run my CPU at 11 x 166mhz (Barton 2500+ speeds), and at 11 x 200mhz, faster really, (Barton 3200+ speeds) and played Doom3 and FarCry etc at both settings. There was no bottleneck, even at the lower CPU speeds.


Fern