AGP Question

[rohizz]

I have a Asus P4S533 motherboard with a 2x AGP slot with a Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB 256-Bit card in it.

I am about to upgrade to an Asrock/Conroe build which has an 8x AGP slot.

Will a Radeon 9800PRO's performance be significantly better in the 8x slot than the 2x slot?

 

[Lord Evermore]

It may be a little better, but don't expect blazing performance differences. The extra bandwidth makes the biggest difference when you have a video card without enough onboard memory, so that it has to access main memory for texture caching. It's probably better to run the games at lower resolutions in this case so that it doesn't have to access main memory, as it's so much slower than onboard memory that it would reduce your framerate. AGP texturing is primarily useful only if it means the difference between playing a game with low performance, and not playing it at all.

Your current board by the way has an AGP4X slot on it, not 2X. Even less of a performance difference going to 8X from 4X.

If you're playing games where you're CPU limited at this point, then you may see larger performance increases, but in games where the GPU was the limitation, you're not going to see more than a few percent difference most likely.