AGP or PCI?

[DannySwazz]

What exactly is the different between AGP and PCI?
Which one should I get?

 

[Swanny]

Get AGP. It is much faster. The main difference is that AGP has a direct link to the main memory. Make sure your MB is AGP capable before buying an AGP card. It is a brown slot that is before all the PCI slots, closest to the northbridge chipset.

 

[MCS]

If you have an AGP slot, use it. There really is no reason to pick PCI over AGP, unless you have no choice.

 

[BlackWob]

They don't really make any more PCI cards anymore; just two cards I know of that are PCI.

 

[trikster2]

What he said:

Make sure you know what your motherboard can handle before you purchase a card.

A LOT of the low budget computers sold today have an integrated AGP graphics chip set with NO AGP expansion slot.

So even though the specs on your new 866Mhz PIII may SAY AGP graphics, getting an AGP card won't work as there is no expansion slot.

If your are in this pickle (like I am) than you have several PCI choices:

ATI Radeon SDR 32MB PCI

ATI Radeon All in Wonder 32MB PCI
Variety of GeForce MX PCI boards (Inno3D, Hercules, Creative, VisionTek all sell PCI cards)

Savage4 PCI

Upcoming KyroII PCI boards.

Voodoo5/4/3 (discontinued boards, no support but awesome PCI performance according to the reviews).

 

[Dark4ng3l]

Hmm also make sure you know what an agp slot looks like. I heard agp cards fir in pci slots if the are pushed in backwards real hard

 

[DannySwazz]

Okay, thanks people.
My motherboard does have an AGP slot so I'm not in the pickle hehe

 

[jobberd]

well, there is at least 1 use for a PCI card, and that is for having a secondary monitor. This is especially true on win2k, where with the dual head video cards the resolution has to be the same for both monitors. just food for thought

 

[Yoshi]

The AGP slot has a dedicated bus between the slot and the north bridge of you chipset and is meant to reduce the load placed on the PCI bus. AGP technology also has the ability to use system memory as video memory which in theory is faster than going back to permanant storage such as your hard drive or CDROM for graphics data such as textures.

AGP at this point show little or no performance advantage over a graphics card on the PCI bus. If you have an AGP slot use it if not don't worry about it. Also as mentioned eariler it is getting harder to find PCI graphics cards.

 

[BFG10K]

AGP at this point show little or no performance advantage over a graphics card on the PCI bus.

Rubbish. Try looking at some T&L or AGP texturing benchmarks. AGP is significanlty faster than PCI, and the difference will only increase in the future with more complex graphics coming to games.

 

[Yoshi]

Hey buddy,

More local video memory is the answer. The AGP bus is a slow dog compared to the memory bus on today's 3D accelerated video cards.

 

[BFG10K]

Don't change the issue. You were not discussing local VRAM, you were saying that AGP is not faster than PCI.

Also, you can have as much local VRAM as you like but you still need a high bandwidth bus (AGP) to transfer the vertex data that's required for T&L.

 

[WarmAndSCSI]

Go AGP!! AGP is much faster. I have a friend that got a GeForce2 MX PCI... boy, he's sorry he got that... I love my AGP card. Plus, AGP is more ready for future games that'll be using HUGE textures. No good cards come in PCI versions, either.. I say if you have an AGP bus, what the point in getting a PCI card???